ANCIENT AND MODERN CELT. 397 



district is not Celtic, it is not Scandinavian ; but rather belongs to 

 the round and short form of cranium, which coDStitutes one ol two 

 marked types, recovered by M. BruUe, of Dijon, from what he be- 

 lieves to be sepulchres of the time of the Burgundians. Specimens 

 of those, and others of the same type, are in the Parisian Society's 

 Gallery ; but they appear to be universally assigned there to a pre= 

 Celtic race. 



Here a8;ain we see the influence of preconceived ideas. The Finnic 

 hypothesis of Arndt and Rask lies at the foundation of the opinions ad-- 

 vanced by Prichard, Retzius, D'Abbadie, Pruner-Bey, Broca, Thomas, 

 and others, as to the Finnic type of the Basques, and the pre-Celtic 

 head-form of Denmark, France, England and Scotland. This assumes 

 the Finnic physical type to survive from periods long anterior to the 

 arrival of Celts or other earliest historic races in Europe. But it is 

 possible that we are tempted by the present* tendencies of anthropo- 

 logical research, in its alliance with geology, to slight recent for more 

 remote sources. That the Scandinavian nations shared with a Finnic 

 population, their common country, is as certain as that the Franks 

 intermingled with the Gauls, and the Angles and Saxons with the 

 Britons. It can scarcely be doubted, moreover, that the Finns — occu- 

 pants of a diminishing area within all recent centuries, — formed a 

 larger proportion of the population of Northern Europe in the ninth 

 century than they do now. In that century it was that the Norwe- 

 gians and Danes commenced their inroads on the British Islands, 

 North Holland, and Normandy ; and that Norskmen, Danskermen, and 

 Ostmen, Fion-ghaill and Dubh-ghaill, began to effect settlements in 

 those countries where their traces still abound. But the Finns, who 

 are elsewhere a hypothetical element of the population of prehistoric 

 Europe, occupied the isolated Scandinavian peninsula in common with 

 the Northmen ; and are even now to be met with on Norwegian fiords 

 from whence the marauding Vikings were wont to issue forth. Subse- 

 quent, however, to a.d. 1 000, — the era of St. Olaf,— increasing inter- 

 course with other nations has tended to approximate the Scandinavian 

 to the Germanic type. Seeing, then, the independent concurrence of 

 so much evidence in proof of the predominance of a brachy cephalic 

 head-form, approximating to the assumed Finnic type, in the very 

 regions of Orkney and the Scoto-Scandinavian mainland, in the north- 

 east of Ireland, and in Normandy, where Norse influence most 

 abounded : is it logical to ignore this, and seek the source of such 

 ethnical peculiarities wholly among hypothetical precursors of the 



