280 GENERAL REMARKS 



The indications in favour of these views are as follows. The bronze- 

 period Briton very closely resembles in his osteological remains the 

 brachycephalous Dane of the neolithic period, and the likeness 

 between these and some of the modern Danes has been noticed by 

 Virchow in his valuable Memoir on ' Die altnordischen Schadel 

 zu Kopenhagen,' 'Arch, fur Anth.' iv. p. 71, 1870. There are not 

 wanting, as already pointed out, p. 227 supra, reasons for supposing 

 that the brachy cephalic people of the round-barrow period may 

 have immigrated into this country from the Cimbric Peninsula 1 , 

 that, in other words, the historical invasions of Cnut and Swegen 

 may have been but repetitions of prehistoric invasions of the 

 bronze period, of, in other words, earlier ' Wikingziige.' This 

 being so, it becomes of consequence to recollect that though the 

 ancients, the contemporaries of the Cimbric invaders, differ as to 

 speaking of them as c Gauls ' or ' Germans,' they are unanimous 

 as to describing them as light-haired and blue-eyed, as well as tall 

 of stature, in comparison at least with the Italian population, 

 Horace's line, ' Nee fera caerulea domuit Germania pube ' (Epod. 

 xvi. 7), being supported by parallel 2 passages nearly infinite in 

 multitude. 



1 Of the modern Danes we know from Dr. Beddoe's paper in the ' Memoirs of the 

 Anthropological Society,' vol. iii. p. 382, that with the cephalic index of 80-5 they 

 combine a stature of 5' 6*9", which would be a fair average for Great Britain, eyes 

 which are almost always light and either blue or bluish-grey, and hair which is 

 generally either pale yellow or light brown. It would be interesting to know whether 

 in the exceptional cases, in which the hair is black, as in the Moen man of whom 

 Dr. Beddoe writes, the colour was not light in infancy ; this change being one which 

 is often observable amongst us now, as indeed it was among the Gauls in the time 

 of Strabo and Diodorus Siculus (and, as Mr. A. J. Evans informs me, among both the 

 Finns and the Lapps), and being one which, upon the principles of modern zoology, 

 should be taken to indicate that the parent stock was originally light-haired perma- 

 nently. The words of Diodorus Siculus (v. 32) are — ra iraidia wapa rois TaXarats etc yeve- 

 tjJs virapxti iroXia Kara to irXeTcrrov vpofiaivovres 5e rats rjXiiciais ets rd tuv irarepcuv XP^H- a 

 rats xp oa ^ s f^(rao'xf)l MX ' r ' l C OVTai - I should doubt, even as to the earlier race, whether 

 Jornandes, when he, in the words of Lipsius, ' adspexit imo transcripsit ' the chapter xi. 

 of Tacitus' 'Agricola' relating to the Silures, had any real reason for substituting 

 * torto plerique crine et nigro nascuntur ' for the exact words of the great historian. 



2 For these see Ukert's 'Germania,' pp. 198, 199, 345, 347, 348, 353, 362 ; Zeuss, 

 'Die Deutschen,' p. 51; Perier, 'Fragments Ethnologiques,' pp. 43-82 ; Prichard, 

 •Physical History,' iii. 3rd ed. 1841, pp. 189-200. The Chevalier Bunsen is referred 

 to by Prichard as saying that he had ' often looked in vain for the auburn or golden 

 locks and the light caerulean eyes of the old Germans, and never verified the picture 

 given by the ancients of his countrymen till he visited Scandinavia, and that there he 

 found himself surrounded with the Germans of Tacitus.' Exact investigation has 



