156 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. [VH. 



measure the record of the mutual encroachments of the 

 other three stocks. 



On the whole, however, it is wonderful how little 

 change has been effected by these mutual invasions and 

 intermixtures. As at the present time, so at the dawn 

 of history, the Melanochroi fringed the Atlantic and 

 the Mediterranean ; the Xanthochroi occupied most of 

 Central and Eastern Europe, and much of Western and 

 Central Asia ; while Mongolians held the extreme east of 

 the Old World. So far as history teaches us, the popu- 

 lations of Europe, Asia, and Africa were, twenty centuries 

 ago, just what they are now, in their broad features and 

 general distribution. 



The evidence yielded by Archaeology is not very 

 definite, but, so far as it goes, it is to much the same 

 effect. The mound builders of Central America seem to 

 have had the characteristic short and broad head of the 

 modern inhabitants of that continent. The tumuli and 

 tombs of Ancient Scandinavia, of pre-Eoman Britain, of 

 Gaul, of Switzerland, reveal two types of skull a broad 

 and a long of which, in Scandinavia, the broad seems 

 to have belonged to the older stock, while the reverse 

 was probably the case in Britain, and certainly in Switz- 

 erland. It has been assumed that the broad-skulled 

 people of ancient Scandinavia were Lapps ; but there 

 is no proof of the fact, and they may have been, like 

 the broad-skulled Swiss and Germans, Xanthochroi. 

 One of the greatest of ethnological difficulties is to 

 know where the modern Swedes, Norsemen, and Saxons 

 got their long heads, as all their neighbours, Fins, Lapps, 

 Slavonians, and South Germans, are broad-headed. 

 Again, who were the small-handed, long-headed people 

 of the " bronze epoch," and what has become of the 

 infusion of their blood among the Xanthochroi ? 



At present Palaeontology yields no safe data to the 



