268 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1051 



pean peoples is held by some-^ while J. L. 

 Myres shows the affinity of boreal and 

 Mediterranean man and suggests their 

 Euro-African origin,^'' and Gray's discus- 

 sion of Myres 's paper emphasizes the swift 

 action of environment" 



Altogether it is hardly to exaggerate to 

 say that you can find authority for placing 

 the breeding grounds of the European peo- 

 ples in north Africa, in central Asia, or in 

 any part of Europe, for sending their 

 wandering progeny in any direction of the 

 compass, with any kind of racial mixture 

 or linguistic evolution and with every pos- 

 sible shade of efficiency or inefficiency on 

 the part of environment. 



But suppose the Aryan business cleared 

 up, there would remain earlier problems of 

 Paleolithic differentiation and the pro- 

 longed twilight journey of man. And 

 suppose we had threaded our way, geolog- 

 ical, ethnographical, linguistic, and geo- 

 graphic, down through the differentiations 

 and mixtures and migrations until we have 

 the Teuton and the Celt in north Europe 

 and the British Isles, are our troubles past ? 

 Let us see. 



You would trace the evolution of the 

 American, as effected by environment. 

 Where will you begin? Not in New Eng- 

 land or Virginia. Not altogether in old 

 England. Not altogether in Teutonic Eu- 

 rope. Before we got through with the 

 American we might like to cover all Ei;- 

 rope with the network of our inquiry. But 

 we can not move too broadly; let us turn 

 to the British Isles. There are still the 

 progeny of the pre-Celts of Neolithic age. 

 There came at least three types of Celt, the 

 Gael, the Briton and the Belgse. Roman 



28 Richard, ' ' History of German Civilization, ' ' 

 Ch. II. 



29 J. L. Myres, "The Alpine Races in Eu- 

 rope," Geog. Jour., 28, 537. 



so Hid., 555-56. 



invasion and rule followed and in due time 

 the Christian religion. Next came the 

 Angles and Saxons and Jutes from across 

 the North Sea, a new deluge of paganism, 

 and a new contribution of racial traits bred 

 in the long past. One would like to know 

 how that old North Sea Teuton differed, 

 fifteen centuries ago, from the Baltic Sea 

 Teuton of the Prussian plain. Was it in 

 the latter 's great strain of Slavic blood, or 

 were there other factors. When and where 

 did the present sum of difference between 

 Prussian and Englishman begin to emerge? 

 At any rate, Jutland, Schleswig-Holstein 

 and the lowlands of the Elbe were poured 

 into our ancestry and were Christianized. 



In the eighth century the Viking rovers 

 came across the North Sea, with fresh ear- 

 goes of vigor and paganism. The Rhine, 

 Scheldt, Seine and Loire as well as Britain 

 felt their power. "From the fury of the 

 Northmen, save us, Lord," runs an old 

 litany. But pirate and robber though he 

 was, here was an element of selection that 

 must not be disregarded. Norway, Sweden 

 and Denmark, says Greene, "were being 

 brought at this time into more settled 

 order by a series of great sovereigns, and 

 the bolder spirits who would not submit to 

 their rule were driven into the seas and 

 embraced a life of piracy and war." But 

 there had been bred into them "in a land 

 that is one third water and one third moun- 

 tain, where winter lasts six months in the 

 year, endurance, ingenuity and daring." 



In two or three centuries more followed 

 the Norman Conquest, in which the Viking 

 brought to England all that he had taken 

 on and taken in of French life. There fol- 

 lows the further coordination of Neolithic, 

 Celtic, Teutonic and Norse men for five and 

 a half centuries, until the early decades of 

 the seventeenth century and the beginnings 

 of British settlement in America. And this 

 was a selective migration whose story can 



