viii.] BRITISH ETHNOLOGY. 169 



[of Britain] are taller than the Kelts, with hair less 

 yellow ; they are slighter in their persons." l 



The evidence adduced appears to leave no reasonable 

 ground for doubting that, at the time of the Eoman 

 conquest, Britain contained people of two types, the 

 dark and the other fair complexioned, and that there was 

 a certain difference between the latter in the north and 

 in the south of Britain : the northern folk being, in the 

 judgment of Tacitus, or, more properly, according to the 

 information he had received from Agricola and others, 

 more similar to the Germans than the latter. As to the 

 distribution of these stocks, all that is clear is, that the 

 dark people were predominant in certain parts of the 

 west of the southern half of Britain, while the fair stock 

 appears to have furnished the chief elements of the 

 population elsewhere. 



No ancient writer troubled himself with measuring 

 skulls, and therefore there is no direct evidence as to the 

 cranial characters of the fair and the dark stocks. The 

 indirect evidence is not very satisfactory. The tumuli of 

 Britain of pre-Eoman date have yielded two extremely 

 different forms of skull, the one broad and the other long ; 

 and the same variety has been observed in the skulls of 

 the ancient Gauls. 2 The suggestion is obvious that the 

 one form of skull may have been associated with the fair, 

 and the other with the dark, complexion. But any con- 

 clusion of this kind is at once checked by the reflection 

 that the extremes of long and short-headedness are to 

 be met with among the fair inhabitants of Germany and 

 of Scandinavia at the present day the south-western 

 Germans and the Swiss being markedly broad-headed, 



1 "The Geography of Strabo." Translated by Hamilton and Falconer: 

 v. 5. 



2 See Dr. Thurnam " On the Two principal Forms of Ancient British and 

 Gaulish Skulls." 



