September 24, 1908] 



jVA rURE 



529 



iair-haired element was at its maximum along the Alps 

 and the Danube, southwards the melanochrous becomes 

 more and more completely dominant, as it practically is 

 to-day in the lower part ol the peninsula. 



(b) In the Alpine regions there has been from Neolithic 

 times a brachycephalic race, also found in Central France 

 and in the British Isles, whither it is supposed to have 

 come in the Bronze age. It has been a fundamental 

 article of faith with bergi and others that this round- 

 neaded race came from Asia, the home of brachycephalism. 

 It is Mongolian according to most, and spoke a non-Aryan 

 language ; but Sergi regards it as Aryan, thus revertmg 

 to the old doctrine, which made the Aryans come from 

 Central .\sia, and he assumes that these invaders imposed 

 their language both on the aborigines of Italy, such as 

 the Ligurians, and on the blonde race of Northern Europe ; 

 but we shall soon see that this assumption has no base. 

 Now, as these folk dwelt in the region where we find the 

 Ligurians of historical times, others have argued that the 

 Ligurians were a non-.Aryan people from Asia. But it is 

 impossible to find any hard-and-fast lines between the 

 Alpine race and the peoples north and south of it in culture 

 and sociology. For that reason when treating of the people 

 of the -Mps in my " Early Age of Greece " 1 did not take 

 any account tA the diflerence in cranial measurements. 

 In 190b, at the British -Association, I maintained that this 

 dillerence of skull type did not mean any racial difference, 

 and on the analogy of the changes in the osteology of the 

 Equidie I urged that the roundness of the skulls was 

 simply due to environment, as the horses of the Pampas 

 when brought up into the mountainous regions of Chile 

 and Peru rapidly change their physical type. Physical 

 anthropologists have already maintained that the round 

 head of the Mongolian has been developed in the high alti- 

 tude of the Altai. If that be so, there is no reason why 

 a similar phenomenon should not have taken place in the 

 Alpine region, in Albania, Anatolia, and wherever else in 

 mountain areas brachycephaly has been found in more than 

 sporadic examples, which of course may well be due to 

 migrations or importation of slaves. But I am far from 

 suggesting that altitude is the only cause of brachycephaly. 



The evidence then, so far as it goes, points to the same 

 conclusion as that to which we came as regards piginenta- 

 tion, and it may eventually be proved that just as each 

 area has its own type of coloration, so also has it its own 

 osteological character. In support of this I may point out 

 that recently Dr. \Mlliam Wright, Hunterian lecturer, has 

 come to the conclusion from his craniological investiga- 

 tions that the brachycephalic Alpine race was evolved on 

 European soil, whilst Dr. C. S. Myers has been led by his 

 researches on Egyptian skulls to conclude that, " in spite 

 of the various infiltrations of foreign blood in the past, 

 modern Egypt contains a liomogeneous population which 

 gradually shifts its average character as we proceed south- 

 wards from the shores of the Mediterranean to Nubia 

 beyond the First Cataract." 



It is not impossible that Alpine environment may have 

 acted upon the shape of the skull of the ox as well as that 

 of man. We know from the examination of the fauna of 

 the Lake dwellings of Switzerland that the Celtic ox (Bos 

 longifrciiis) was there the common type, and its descendants 

 still continue to be the typical breed along the .\lpino chain. 

 This ox is characterised by its strongly developed occipital 

 region and its small horns curved forward and inward. 

 As it differs so essentially from the urus {Bos primigettiiis) 

 ■ind from the long-horned cattle of the Mediterranean 

 lands, it seems not unlikely that the peculiar cranial 

 formation may have been evolved under mountainous 

 environment. 



It is now clear that differences in the shape of the skull 

 and in the colour of the skin, hair, and eves cannot be 

 at all implicitly relied on as criteria of race. The defenders 

 of the non-.Aryan character of the dark races of Greece, 

 Ttaly, Spain, France, and the British Isles have now to 

 depend on two arguments only, one of which is linguistic, 

 the other sociological. It is admitted that it is very 

 difficult to point to any non-.\ryan survivals in the vocabu- 

 laries of the languages of these countries, and it is also 

 •admitted that in them all the tense system of the Aryans 

 has been taken over in its entirety. Neither Kretschmer 

 nor anyone else has ventured to affirm that there is any 



NO. 2030, VOL. 7S] 



survival of non-Aryan syntactical forms in Greek, the 

 language of all others in wnich the .Aryan tense system 

 is tound in its greatest delicacy and perfection. But we 

 know that in all cases \\'here an Ar\:m language has with- 

 out doubt been adopted by a non-.\ryan folk the tense 

 system is invariably broken up. No belter example than 

 this is needed than ordinary " pigeon " English. So 

 difficult is it for the defenders of the non-.Aryan theory of 

 the origin of the aborigines of Greece to maintain their 

 position that one of the latest. Prof. Burrows, has to rely 

 on certain supposed syntactical survivals of a non-.Aryan 

 language which Sir John Rhys believes that he has found 

 in Welsh and Irish and in the remarkable resemblance 

 which Prof. Morris Jones thinks that he has traced between 

 the syntax of those languages and that of Berber and 

 ancient Egyptian. 



A'et when we examine the evidence on which Sir John 

 Rhys relies, it turns out to be only three Welsh and 

 Cornish oghams, written not in pure Celtic, but in dog 

 Latin, and also two Irish oghams, which show a loose- 

 ness in the use of the genitive suffix at a time when final 

 syllables were dropping out of use in Irish. Sir John 

 Rhys supposes that the non-.Aryan inhabitants of these 

 islands derived their Gaelic speech from a people whom 

 he terms Celticans, who spoke Goidelic, and who were 

 followed by the Brythons, who found the aborigines already 

 Celticised. Prof. Morris Jones freely admits that the 

 aborigines must have borrowed the full .Aryan tense system, 

 a fact in itself sufficient, from what I have already said., 

 to arouse grave suspicions as to the validity of any argu- 

 ments based on supposed fundamental grammatical differ- 

 ences. But this supposed taking over of the full .Aryan 

 tense system by the non-.Aryan aborigines of these islands 

 is rendered all the more miraculous from the circumstance 

 that Sir John Rhvs holds that his Celticans who spoke 

 Goidelic " came over not later than the great movements 

 which took place in the Celtic world of the Continent in 

 the si.Kth and fifth centuries before our era," that the 

 Brythons came over to Britain between the time of Pytheas 

 and that of Julius Ca;sar," and that the Brythons were 

 not likely to come into contact on any large scale with 

 the aborigines " before they had been to a considerable 

 extent Celticised." It is thus assumed that it was possible 

 for tlie aborigines to have been so completely Celticised 

 as to have adopted the -Aryan tense system, as well as the 

 .Aryan vocabulary, in its fulness in the interval between 

 the sixth or fifth century and the second century B.C. A'et 

 English has been the master speech in Britain for many 

 centuries, and that, too, when reading and writing have 

 been commonly practised ; yet Gaelic still survives, whilst 

 Welsh not only survives, but flourishes. It is therefore 

 simply incredible that such a complete transformation as 

 that postulated could have taken place in three or four 

 centuries in an age when writing and literature can be 

 hardly said to have existed in these islands. 



Let us now see under what conditions does one race or 

 people borrow the language of another. Slaves of course 

 take over the language of their masters, but we have to 

 consider (i) the adoption by a conquering people of the 

 language of the conquered ; {2) the adoption by a conquered 

 people of that of their conquerors ; and (3) the adoption by 

 a people, themselves unconquered, of the language of their 

 neighbours. Under what conditions do the conquerors 

 adopt the language of the conquered? Ireland affords us 

 at least two certain examples. Cromwell planted large 

 bodies of his English soldiers in Tipperary, but they had 

 no English women, and therefore took as wives the 

 daughters of the land, who spoke the Irish language. 

 From this union resulted a splendid offspring, who spoke 

 chiefly the language of their Irish mothers, and not their 

 fathers' English. So it came to pass that in a single 

 generation the progeny of Cromwell's Puritans were in 

 language as Irish as the purest-blooded aboriginal of 

 Munster. Yet this adoption of the Irish language by the 

 great majority of the children of these settlers took place 

 in spite of the effect which the reading of books in English 

 must have exerted to counteract the tendency to adopt the 

 Irish language. Let us go back five hundred years in 

 Irish history, and we find exactly the same process going 

 on. The Normans who followed Strongbow into Ireland, 

 like their captain, frequently married native women. It 



