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The Natural History of Frenchmen. 
By Dr. John Beddoe, Pr.A.S.L. 
Bead at the General Meeting, January Qth, 1870. 
Abstract. 
Dr. Beddoe made a verbal communication to the Society " On the Natural 
History of Frenchmen." Bef erring first to the pre-historic inhabitants of 
France, and the diversity of type exhibited by them, he took the oppor- 
tunity of exhibiting a cranium of great antiquity and interest, presented 
to him by P. J. Worsley, Esq., who had procured it from the celebrated 
cavern of Lombrive. 
He then described the location of the races, Iberian or Aquitanian, 
Ligurian, Kelto-Gallic, and Kelto-Kymric, who occupied France at the 
beginning of the historic period, and shewed the apparent relation of their 
distribution to the physical geography of the country. 
He passed in review the more important of the successive invasions 
and settlements of aliens since that time. Such were those of the Greeks, 
whose physical type is thought to remain at Aries ; of the Roman, or so 
called Roman colonists or legionaries ; of the insular Bretons in Armorica, 
of the Franks in the north, the Burgundians in the east, the Goths in the 
south ; the Alans, Taif als, Saxons, in the west of France ; the Alemans or 
Swabians in Alsace; the Saracens (Arabs, Kabyles or Iberians,) in various 
isolated portions of the southern half of the country; and the Normans in 
the province that bears their name, and in the adjacent portion of - 
Bretagne. 
This was followed by a sketch of the physical characteristics of modern 
Frenchmen, and the differences observed, in mental and moral, as well as 
in physical traits, between the northern and north-eastern French on one 
hand, and southern and western French on the other ; and by an explana- 
tion of the theories of M. M. Broca and Boudin, and other French anthro- 
pologists, as to the dependance of variations of stature, as observed in the 
several provinces and departments of France, on the differences of race 
rather than on those of climate, food, &c. 
