514 
NATURE 
THE FOREFATHERS OF THE ENGLISH 
PEORER™ 
“THE English people of the present day present two types of 
physical structure, which are extremely different in their 
most marked forms, though they pass into one another by every 
shade of gradation. The one type is tall, fair-complexioned, 
yellow or red haired, and blue-eyed; the other, short, dark- 
complexioned, black-haired, and black-eyed. The two types 
and their intermediate gradations are, at present, to be found side 
by side in most parts of the British Islands ; but there is a marked 
predominance of the fair type in the eastern half of Britain. The 
languages spoken by the English people have, at the present 
time, no relation to these two physical types ; English speakers 
and Celtic speakers belonging no less to the one type than to 
the other. Nor are the two Celtic dialects, Cymric and Gaelic, 
confined to people of the one or the other physical type, as both 
the types described are exhibited in their extreme forms among 
Welshmen, Highlanders, and Irishmen. 
The earliest historical records of the nature of the population 
of Britain, furnished by Cesar, Strabo, and Tacitus, take us back 
nineteen hundred years, and show that, at that time, the physical 
characters of the population might be described in the same lan- 
guage as at present. The people of South-eastern England 
and of Caledonia were certainly tall, fair, and blue-eyed, with 
hair varying from yellow to red in hue ; while, in South Wales, 
they had dark hair and complexions, resembling the Spaniards 
of that day. But there was a wonderful difference in language 
between the ancient and the modern inhabitants of these islands, 
inasmuch as all these people of Britain, so far as we know, spoke 
the Cymric dialect of the Celtic tongue; while it is probable, 
though we have no absolute knowledge on this point, that in 
Ireland they spoke Gaelic. Thus, at the time of the Roman in- 
vasion, the outward physical characters of the population of these 
islands were much what they are now, though the language spoken 
was, probably, altogether Celtic. And there was no parity between 
the distribution of the Cymric and Gaelic dialects of the Celtic 
and that of the two physical types, any more than there is now 
between English and Celtic and the fair and dark stocks by which 
those languages are spoken. If we confine our attention to the 
British Islands, therefore, we have absolutely no means of ascrib- 
ing any special physical characters to the Celtic-speaking people. 
A British, or Irish, ‘‘ Celt” might be tall or short, dark or fair, 
rounded-headed or long-headed; and the remark of Professor 
Max Miiller that it is as rational to speak of a dolichocephalic 
language as of a Celtic skull is, for the “ Celts” of Britain, per- 
fectly justified. 
Whence was this Celtic-speaking people, with its two con- 
trasted dark and fair forms, which inhabited Britain nineteen 
hundred years ago, derived? The position of the British Islands 
is sufficient to suggest the extreme probability that it migrated 
from Europe, the eastern and the southern faces of these islands 
being within easy reach of the shores of those countries which 
are now Norway, Denmark, North Germany, Holland, Belgium, 
and France. And the probability suggested by the facts of 
geography becomes converted into a certainty by those of ethno- 
logy and of history. 
In the first place, if we turn to the existing population of the 
continent of Europe and Asia, we shall at once recognise our 
two physical types—the fair and the dark. From Norway to 
North-eastern France the predominant constituents of the rive- 
rain population of the North Sea and of the British Channel are 
tall, fair-haired, and blue-eyed. In North-western France the 
proportion of short and dark people increases, until, in Southern 
and South-western France, they are the chief constituents of 
the population. A traveller who should set out from the 
Orkney Islands and call at every port in the North Sea, and 
who then should make a land journey from the mouth of the 
Elbe to that of the Don, would find the people with whom he 
met to be generally, and in many regions exclusively, of the fair 
type. Onthe other hand, if he set out from Galway and cruised 
along the western coasts of these islands, and of France and of 
Spain and the north shore of the Mediterranean, he would find 
as marked a predominance of the dark type. In fact, the 
population of the southern and western parts of France, 
of Spain, of the Ligurian shore, and of Western and South- 
ern Italy, is as generally dark as that of North Germany is fair. 
There is no reason to think that climatal conditions haye had 
anything whatever to do with this singular distribution of the 
* A Lecture delivered by Prof. Huxley, in St. Ceorge’s Hall, on Sunday, 
March 13, and revised by the author. 
fair and the dark types. Not only do the dark Celtic-speakers 
of the Scotch Highlands lie five or six degrees farther north 
than the fair Black-foresters of Germany ; but, to the north of 
all the fair inhabitants of Europe, in Lapland, there lives a race 
of people very different in their characters from the dark stock | 
of Britain, but still having black hair, black eyes, and swarthy 
yellowish complexions. 
Thus, having regard only to physical characters, the popula- 
tion of Europe falls into three broad bands, which run in a rough 
way from west to east. In the north is the zone of the black- 
haired, black-eyed Mongoloid Lapps. In the south is the zone of 
the people who resemble the dark type of the British Islands, 
and who have been called Af:/onochroi ; between them lies the 
broad belt of fair people, who have been termed Xanthochroi. 
And if this were a mere natural history question, the facts I 
have mentioned would allow us to draw but one conclusion as 
to the origin of the population of these islands—namely, that 
the dark type has been furnished by immigrants from the Conti- 
nental AZelanochroi; the fair type by immigrants from the Con- 
tinental Xanthochrvot. But history and philology have every 
right to be heard in such a matter as this ; and I must now try 
as well as I can (for 1am neither historian nor philologer) to 
put before you what they have to say. 
What history tells us, so far as it goes, is quite in accordance 
with the suggestions of biology. It is certain that, from the fifth 
century to the tenth a vast number of people from North Ger- 
many and Scandinavia poured into the British Islands on all 
sides, but, as might be expected, most persistently and nume- 
rously into the eastern moiety of Britain. They brought with 
them languages which may properly and conveniently be termed 
dialects of ‘Teutonic, in contradistinction to the indigenous 
dialects of Celtic. Out of the North German dialects the 
language usually known as Anglo-Saxon was developed, and 
from it, by subsequent modification and absorption of, for the 
most part, Scandinavian, Celtic, and French elements, has grown 
English. The invasion which thus changed the language of 
Britain introduced no new element into the physical conforma- 
tion of the people, so far as stature and complexion are con- 
cerned, though it may have done so in the matter of cranial 
conformation. It is unquestioned that Saxons, Danes, and 
Norsemen were alike a tall, fair-haired people ; and their immi- 
gration strengthened the Xanthochroic element of our population, 
but added nothing new, unless it were a longer form of head. 
Tt is a very remarkable circumstance that the skulls of the exist- 
ing Scandinavians—and of the Allemanni and Saxons, if not of 
the whole of the ancient Germans—are long, while those of the 
South Germans and Swiss of the present day, and those which 
very probably belonged to the ancient Belge, are round. ‘Thus, 
to put the matter in another way, tall stature, fair hair, and blue 
eyes, in a native of Britain, are no evidence of his descent rather 
from the primitive Celtic-speaking, than from the immigrant Teu- 
tonic-speaking, element of our population, or the reverse. He isas 
likely to be a “Celt” as a “ Teuton ;” a ‘* Teuton” as a “Celt.” 
But history teaches us more than this. There is the clearest 
evidence that the Gauls—the Celtic-speaking people who burnt 
Rome nearly four centuries before our era—belonged to the fair 
type, and neither by their stature, their complexions, the colour 
of their eyes or their hair, were distinguishable from such 
Teutonic-speaking people as the Goths, who sacked Rome four 
centuries after it: and that, for these eight centuries at any rate, 
North-western, Central, Eastern Europe, and the western part 
of Central Asia were occupied by a tall, fair, blue-eyed people” 
who were known by the names of Celta, Belge, Germani, 
Venedi or Wends, and Alani, according to the districts which 
they occupied and the languages which they spoke.t 
Thus, when history first makes known the Celtic language to us, 
itis in the mouths of a people extremely similar in their outward 
appearance to the Germans and the Slavonians; and when the 
affinities of the Celtic, the Teutonic, and Slavonic languages are 
worked out by the philologer, they are all found to belong to the 
same great group of Aryan languages. The argument to be 
drawn from the physical affinity of the Celtic-speaking with the 
* The story told by Suetonius, that Caligula tried to pass off some tall 
Gauls for Germans, by making them redden their hair, is often quoted to 
prove that the hair of the Gauls differed from that of the Germans, But as 
the Germans themselves were in the habit of reddening their hair artificially, 
the force of the argument does not appear, 
+ ‘Those who have any doubts upon this subject had better consult the 
great work of Kaspar Zeuss, ‘‘Die Deutschen tind die Nachbarstémme,” 
published thirty years ago; or the excellent discussion, mainly based 
upon Zeuss, in Pritchard; or the instructive essays of Brandes and De 
Belloguet. 
[March 17, 1870 — 
a 
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