CHAP, ix.] IBERIC AND OTHER ELEMENTS IN FRANCE. 327 



no less than twenty-one come under Dr. Broca's definition 

 of " departements noirs." In this we have the clearest 

 proof that the choice by Augustus of the latter river as 

 the boundary of the province was due to the identity of 

 race of the dwellers south of the Loire with those of the 

 Garonne, which would cause them to be more easily 

 governed from a Basque than from a Celtic centre. 

 (Compare Maps, Figs. 112, 113.) The five departments 

 of Loire Inferieure, Vendee, Maine et Loire, Deux Sevres, 

 and Charente Inferieure, in which the prevailing popu- 

 lation is of moderate stature, with brown hair and gray 

 or brown eyes, lie on the seaboard open to invasion; and 

 the six " departements gris," south of the Garonne, mark 

 the settlements of the fair-haired Visigoths, Franks, and 

 English, who have been masters of that country from the 

 year A.D. 419 to the present day. That the ancient popu- 

 lation was to a considerable extent dispossessed is de- 

 monstrated by the conditions under which it passed under 

 the Gothic yoke, that two-thirds of the land and one- third 

 of the slaves were to become the property of their con- 

 querors. 1 The departments in question may be said at 

 the present day to be occupied by a Celt-Ibero-Teutonic 

 people, whose physique is intermediate between the van- 

 quished and the victors. 



Outside the boundaries of Aquitaine the Iberian blood 

 asserts itself in the swarthy small inhabitants of Brittany 

 in the east in Ardeche, and in the south in Aude and 

 Arriege. I have already hinted at the probability of a 

 connection between Armorica and Aquitaine from a pass- 

 age in Pliny which has been quoted, and we have seen 

 that Iberia, in ancient times, extended eastward to the 

 Rhone and westward to the ocean. The Armoricans 



1 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, iv. 440. 



