Part II European Races in History
I — Eolithic Man
Before considering the living populations of Europe we must give consideration to the extinct peoples that preceded them.
The science of anthropology is very recent—in its present form less than fifty years old—but it has already revolutionized our knowledge of the past and extended prehistory so that it is now measured not by thousands but by tens of thousands of years.
The history of man prior to the period of metals has been divided into ten or more subdivisions, many of them longer than the time covered by written records. Man has struggled up through the ages, to revert again and again into savagery and barbarism but apparently retaining each time something gained by the travail of his ancestors.
So long as there is in the world a freely breeding stock or race that has in it an inherent capacity for development and growth, mankind will continue to ascend until, possibly through the selection and regulation of breeding as intelligently applied as in the case of domestic animals, it will control its own destiny and attain moral heights as yet unimagined.
The impulse upward, however, is supplied by a very small number of nations and by a very small proportion of the population in such nations. The section of any community that produces leaders or genius of any sort is only a minute percentage. To utilize and adapt to human needs the forces and the raw materials of nature, to invent new processes, to establish new principles, and to elucidate and unravel the laws that control the universe call for genius. To imitate or to adopt what others have invented is not genius but mimicry.
This something which we call “genius” is not a matter of family, but of stock or strain, and is inherited in precisely the same manner as are the purely physical characters. It may be latent through several generations of obscurity and then flare up when the opportunity comes. Of this we have many examples in America. This is what education or opportunity does for a community; it permits in these rare cases fair play for development, but it is race, always race, that produces genius. An individual of inferior type or race may profit greatly by good environment. On the other hand, a member of a superior race in bad surroundings may, and very often does, sink to an extremely low level. While emphasizing the importance of race, it must not be forgotten that environment, while it does not alter the potential capacity of the stock, can perform miracles in the development of the individual.
This genius producing type is slow breeding and there is real danger of its loss to mankind. Some idea of the value of these small strains can be gained from the recent statistics which demonstrate that Massachusetts produces more than fifty times as much genius per hundred thousand whites as does Georgia, Alabama or Mississippi, although apparently the race, religion and environment, other than climatic conditions, are much the same, except for the numbing presence in the South of a large stationary Negro population.
The more thorough the study of European prehistory becomes, the more we realize how many advances of culture have been made and then lost. Our parents were accustomed to regard the overthrow of ancient civilization in the Dark Ages as the greatest catastrophe of mankind, but we now know that the classic period of Greece was preceded by similar dark ages caused by the Dorian invasions, that had overthrown the Homeric-Mycenæan culture, which in its turn had flourished after the destruction of its parent, the brilliant Minoan culture of Crete. Still earlier, some twelve thousand years ago, the Azilian Period of poverty and retrogression succeeded the wonderful achievements of the hunter-artists of the Upper Paleolithic.
The progress of civilization becomes evident only when immense periods are studied and compared, but the lesson is always the same, namely, that race is everything. Without race there can be nothing except the slave wearing his master’s clothes, stealing his master’s proud name, adopting his master’s tongue and living in the crumbling ruins of his master’s palace. Everywhere on the sites of ancient civilizations the Turk, the Kurd and the Bedouin camp; and Americans may well pause and consider the fate of this country which they, and they alone, founded and nourished with their blood. The immigrant ditch diggers and the railroad navvies were to our fathers what their slaves were to the Romans and the same transfer of political power from master to servant is taking place to-day.
Man’s place of origin was undoubtedly Asia. Europe is only a peninsula of the Eurasiatic continent and although the extent of its land area during the Pleistocene was much greater than at present, it is certain from the distribution of the various species of man, that the main races evolved in Asia, probably north of the great Himalayan range long before the centre of that continent was reduced to a series of deserts by progressive desiccation.
The evidence based on man’s relatively large bulk, on the lack of the development of his fore limbs and particularly on his highly specialized foot structure all indicate that he has not been arboreal for a vast period of time, probably not since the end of the Miocene. The change of habitat from the trees to the ground may have been caused by a profound modification of climate, from moist to dry or from warm to cold, which in turn may have affected the food supply and compelled a more carnivorous diet.
Evidence of the location of the early evolution of man in Asia and in the geologically recent submerged area toward the southeast is afforded by the fossil deposits in the Siwalik hills of northern India; where the remains of primates have been found which were either ancestral or closely related to the four genera of living anthropoids and where we may confidently look for remains of the earliest human forms; and by the discovery in Java, which in Pliocene times was connected with the mainland over what is now the South China Sea, of the earliest known form of erect primate, the Pithecanthropus. This ape-like man is practically the “missing link,” being intermediate between man and the anthropoids and is generally believed to have been contemporary with the Günz glaciation of some 500,000 years ago, the first of the four great glacial advances in Europe.
One or two species of anthropoid apes have been discovered in the Miocene of Europe which may possibly have been remotely related to the ancestors of man but when the archæological exploration of Asia shall be as complete and intensive as that of Europe it is probable that more forms of fossil anthropoids and new species of man will be found there.
Man existed in Europe during the second and third interglacial periods, if not earlier. We have his artifacts in the form of eoliths, at least as early as the second interglacial stage, the Mindel-Riss, of some 300,000 years ago. A single jaw found near Heidelberg is referred to this period and is the earliest skeletal evidence of man in Europe. From certain remarkable characters in this jaw, it has been assigned to a new species, Homo heidelbergensis.
Then follows a long period showing only scanty industrial relics and no known skeletal remains. Man was slowly and painfully struggling up from a culture phase where chance flints served his temporary purpose. This period, known as the Eolithic, was succeeded by a stage of human development where slight chipping and retouching of flints for his increasing needs led, after vast intervals of time, to the deliberate manufacture of tools. This Eolithic Period is necessarily extremely hazy and uncertain. Whether or not certain chipped or broken flints, called eoliths or dawn stones, were actually human artifacts or were the products of natural forces is, however, immaterial for man must have passed through such an eolithic stage.
The further back we go toward the commencement of this Eolithic culture, the more unrecognizable the flints necessarily become until they finally cannot be distinguished from natural stone fragments. At the beginning, the earliest man merely picked up a convenient stone, used it once and flung it away, precisely as an anthropoid ape would act to-day if he wanted to break the shell of a tortoise or crack an ostrich egg.
Man must have experienced the following phases of development in the transition from the prehuman to the human stage: first, the utilization of chance stones and sticks; second, the casual adaptation of flints by a minimum amount of chipping; third, the deliberate manufacture of the simplest implements from flint nodules; and fourth, the invention of new forms of weapons and tools in ever increasing variety.
Of the last two stages we have an extensive and clear record. Of the second stage we have in the eoliths intermediate forms ranging from flints that are evidently results of natural causes to flints that are clearly artifacts. The first and earliest stage, of course, could leave behind it no definite record and must in the present state of our knowledge rest on hypothesis.
II — Paleolithic Man
With the deliberate manufacture of implements from flint nodules, we enter the beginning of Paleolithic time and from here on our way is relatively clear. The successive stages of the Paleolithic were of great length but are each characterized by some improvement in the manufacture of tools. During long ages man was merely a tool making and tool using animal and, after all is said, that is about as good a definition as we can find to-day for the primate we call human.
The Paleolithic Period or Old Stone Age lasted from the somewhat indefinite termination of the Eolithic, some 150,000 years ago, to the Neolithic or New Stone Age, which began about 7000 B. C.
The Paleolithic falls naturally into three great subdivisions. The Lower Paleolithic includes the whole of the last interglacial stage with the subdivisions of the Pre-Chellean, Chellean and Acheulean; the Middle Paleolithic covers the whole of the last glaciation and is co-extensive with the Mousterian Period and the dominance of the Neanderthal species of man.1 The Upper Paleolithic embraces all the postglacial stages down to the Neolithic and includes the subdivisions of the Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian and Azilian. During the entire Upper Paleolithic, except the short closing phase, the Cro-Magnon race flourished.
It is not until after the third severe period of great cold, known as the Riss glaciation, nor until we enter, some 150,000 years ago, the third and last interglacial stage of temperate climate, known as the Riss-Würm, that we find a definite and ascending series of culture. The Pre-Chellean, Chellean and Acheulean divisions of the Lower Paleolithic occupied the whole of this warm or rather temperate interglacial phase, which lasted nearly 100,000 years.
A shattered skull, a jaw and some teeth have been discovered recently in Sussex, England. These remains were attributed to the same individual, who was named the Piltdown Man. Owing to the extraordinary thickness of the skull and the simian character of the jaw, a new genus, Eoanthropus, the “dawn man,” was created and assigned to Pre-Chellean times. Some of the tentative restorations of the fragmentary bones make this skull altogether too modern and too capacious for a Pre-Chellean or even a Chellean.
Further study and comparison with the jaws of other primates also indicate that the jaw belonged to a chimpanzee so that the genus Eoanthropus must now be abandoned and the Piltdown Man must be included in the genus Homo as at present constituted.
In any event the Piltdown Man is highly aberrant and, so far as our present knowledge goes, does not appear to be related to any other species of man found during the Lower Paleolithic. Future discoveries of the Piltdown type and for that matter of Heidelberg Man may, however, raise either or both of them to generic rank.
In later Acheulean times a new human species, very likely descended from the early Heidelberg Man of Eolithic times, appears on the scene and is known as the Neanderthal race. Many fossil remains of this type have been found.
The Neanderthaloids occupied the European stage exclusively, with the possible exception of the Piltdown Man, from the first appearance of man in Europe to the end of the Middle Paleolithic. The Neanderthals flourished throughout the entire duration of the last glacial advance known as the Würm glaciation. This period, known as the Mousterian, began about 50,000 years ago and lasted some 25,000 years.
The Neanderthal species disappears suddenly and completely with the advent of postglacial times, when, about 25,000 years ago, it was apparently supplanted or exterminated by a new and far higher race, the famous Cro-Magnons.
There may well have been during Mousterian times races of man in Europe other than the Neanderthaloids, but of them we have no record. Among the numerous remains of Neanderthals, however, we do find traces of distinct types showing that this race in Europe was undergoing evolution and was developing marked variations in characters.
Neanderthal Man was an almost purely meat eating hunter, living in caves or rather in their entrances. He was dolichocephalic and not unlike existing Australoids, although not necessarily of black skin and was, of course, in no sense a Negro.
The skull was characterized by heavy superorbital ridges, a low and receding forehead, protruding and chinless under jaw and the posture was imperfectly erect. This race was widely spread and rather numerous. Some of its blood may have trickled down to the present time and occasionally one sees a skull apparently of the Neanderthal type. The best skull of this type ever seen by the writer belonged to a very intellectual professor in London, who was quite unconscious of his value as a museum specimen. In the old black breed of Scotland the overhanging brows and deep-set eyes are suggestive of this race.
Along with other ancient and primitive racial remnants, ferocious gorilla-like living specimens of Paleolithic man are found not infrequently on the west coast of Ireland and are easily recognized by the great upper lip, bridgeless nose, beetling brow with low growing hair and wild and savage aspect. The proportions of the skull which give rise to this large upper lip, the low forehead and the superorbital ridges are certainly Neanderthal characters. The other traits of this Irish type are common to many primitive races. This is the Irishman of caricature and the type was very frequent in America when the first Irish immigrants came in 1846 and the following years. It seems, however, to have almost disappeared in this country. If, as it is claimed, the Neanderthals have left no trace of their blood in living populations, these Firbolgs are derived from some very ancient and primitive race as yet undescribed.
In the Upper Paleolithic, which began after the close of the fourth and last glaciation, about 25,000 years ago, the Neanderthal race was succeeded by men of very modern aspect, known as Cro-Magnons. The date of the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic is the first we can fix with accuracy and its correctness can be relied on within narrow limits. The Cro-Magnon race first appears in the Aurignacian subdivision of the Upper Paleolithic. Like the Neanderthals, they were dolichocephalic but with a cranial capacity superior to the average in existing European populations and a stature of very remarkable size.
It is quite astonishing to find that the predominant race in Europe 25,000 years ago, or more, was not only much taller, but had an absolute cranial capacity in excess of the average of the present population. The low cranial average of existing populations in Europe can be best explained by the presence of large numbers of individuals of inferior mentality. These defectives have been carefully preserved by modern charity, whereas in the savage state of society the backward members were allowed to perish and the race was carried on by the vigorous and not by the weaklings.
The high brain capacity of the Cro-Magnons is paralleled by that of the ancient Greeks, who in a single century gave to the world out of their small population much more genius than all the other races of mankind have since succeeded in producing in a similar length of time. Attica between 530 and 430 B. C. had an average population of about 90,000 freemen, and yet from this number were born no less than fourteen geniuses of the very highest rank. This would indicate a general intellectual status as much above that of the Anglo-Saxons as the latter are above the Negroes. The existence at these early dates of a very high cranial capacity and its later decline shows that there is no upward tendency inherent in mankind of sufficient strength to overcome obstacles placed in its way by stupid social customs.
All historians are familiar with the phenomenon of a rise and decline in civilization such as has occurred time and again in the history of the world but we have here in the disappearance of the Cro-Magnon race the earliest example of the replacement of a very superior race by an inferior one. There is great danger of a similar replacement of a higher by a lower type here in America unless the native American uses his superior intelligence to protect himself and his children from competition with intrusive peoples drained from the lowest races of eastern Europe and western Asia.
While the skull of the Cro-Magnon was long, the cheek bones were very broad and this combination of broad face with long skull constitutes a peculiar disharmonic type which occurs to-day only among the very highly specialized Esquimaux and one or two other unimportant groups.
Skulls of this particular type, however, are found in small numbers among existing populations in central France, precisely in the district where the fossil remains of this race were first discovered. These isolated Frenchmen probably represent the last lingering remnant of this splendid race of hunting savages.
The Cro-Magnon culture is found around the basin of the Mediterranean, and this fact, together with the conspicuous absence in eastern Europe of its earliest phases, the lower Aurignacian, indicates that it entered Europe by way of north Africa, as its successors, the Mediterranean race, probably did in Neolithic times. There is little doubt that the Cro-Magnons originally developed in Asia and were in their highest stage of physical development at the time of their first appearance in Europe. Whatever change took place in their stature during their residence there seems to have been in the nature of a decline rather than of a further development.
There is nothing whatever of the Negroid in the Cro-Magnons and they are not in any way related to the Neanderthals, who represent a distinct and, save for the suggestions made above, an extinct species of man.
The Cro-Magnon race persisted through the entire Upper Paleolithic, during the periods known as the Aurignacian, Solutrean and Magdalenian, from 25,000 to 10,000 B. C. While it is possible that the blood of this race enters somewhat into the composition of the peoples of western Europe, its influence cannot be great and the Cro-Magnons—the Nordics of their day—disappear from view with the advent of the warmer climate of recent times.
It has been suggested that, following the fading ice edge north and eastward through Asia into North America, they became the ancestors of the Esquimaux but certain anatomical objections are fatal to this interesting theory. No one, however, who is familiar with the culture of the Esquimaux and especially with their wonderful skill in bone and ivory carving, can fail to be struck with the similarity of their technique to that of the Cro-Magnons.
To the Cro-Magnon race the world owes the birth of art. Caverns and shelters are constantly unearthed in France and Spain, where the walls and ceilings are covered with polychrome paintings or with incised bas-reliefs of animals of the chase. A few clay models, sometimes of the human form, are also found, together with abundant remains of their chipped but unpolished stone weapons and tools. Certain facts stand out clearly, namely, that they were purely hunters and clothed themselves in furs and skins. They knew nothing of agriculture or of domestic animals, even the dog being probably as yet untamed and the horse regarded merely as an object of chase.
The question of their knowledge of the principle of the bow and arrow during the Aurignacian and Solutrean is an open one but there are definite indications of the use of the arrow, or at least the barbed dart, in early Magdalenian times and this weapon was well known in the succeeding Azilian Period.
The presence toward the end of this last period of quantities of very small flints called microliths has given rise to much controversy. It is possible that some of these microliths represent the tips of small poisoned arrows such as are now in very general use among primitive hunting tribes the world over. Certain grooves in some of the flint weapons of the Upper Paleolithic may also have been used for the reception of poison. It is highly probable that the immediate predecessors of the Azilians, the Cro-Magnons, perhaps the greatest hunters that ever lived, not only used poisoned darts but were adepts in trapping game by means of pitfalls and snares, precisely as do some of the hunting tribes of Africa to-day. Barbed arrowheads of flint or bone, such as were commonly used by the North American Indians, have not been found in Paleolithic deposits.
In the Solutrean Period the Cro-Magnons shared Europe with a new race known as the Brünn-Předmost, found in central Europe. This race is characterized by a long face as well as a long skull, and was, therefore, harmonic. This Brünn-Předmost race appears to have been well settled in the Danubian and Hungarian plains and this location indicates an eastern rather than a southern origin.
Good anatomists have seen in this race the last lingering traces of the Neanderthaloids but it is more probable that we have here the first advance wave of the primitive forerunners of one of the modern European dolichocephalic races.
This new race was not artistic, but had great skill in fashioning weapons and possibly is associated with the peculiarities of Solutrean culture and the decline of art which characterizes that period. The artistic impulse of the Cro-Magnons which flourished so vigorously during the Aurignacian seems to be quite suspended during this Solutrean Period, but reappears in the succeeding Magdalenian times. This Magdalenian art is clearly the direct descendant of Aurignacian models and in this closing age of the Cro-Magnons all forms of Paleolithic art, carving, engraving, painting and the manufacture of weapons, reach their highest and final culmination.
Nine or ten thousand years may be assigned to the Aurignacian and Solutrean Periods and we may with considerable certainty give the minimum date of 16,000 B. C. as the beginning of Magdalenian time. Its entire duration can be safely set down at 6,000 years, thus bringing the final termination of the Magdalenian to 10,000 B. C. All these dates are extremely conservative and the error, if any, is in assigning too late and not too early a period to the end of Magdalenian times.
At the close of the Magdalenian we enter upon the last period of Paleolithic times, the Azilian, which lasted from about 10,000 to 7,000 B. C., when the Upper Paleolithic, the age of chipped flints, definitely and finally ends in Europe. This period takes its name from the Mas d’Azil, or “House of Refuge,” a huge cavern in the eastern Pyrenees where the local Protestants took shelter during the persecutions. The extensive deposits in this cave are typical of the Azilian epoch and here certain marked pebbles may be the earliest known traces of symbolic writing, but true writing was probably not developed until the late Neolithic.
With the advent of this Azilian Period art entirely disappears and the splendid physical type of the Cro-Magnons is succeeded by what appear to have been degraded savages, who had lost the force and vigor necessary for the strenuous chase of large game and had turned to the easier life of fishermen.
In the Azilian the bow and arrow are in common use in Spain and it is well within the possibilities that the introduction and development of this new weapon from the South may have played its part in the destruction of the Cro-Magnons; otherwise it is hard to account for the disappearance of this race of large stature and great brain power.
The Azilian, also called the Tardenoisian in the north of France, was evidently a period of racial disturbance and at its close the beginnings of the existing races are found.
From the first appearance of man in Europe and for many tens of thousands of years down to some ten or twelve thousand years ago all known human remains are of dolichocephalic type.
In the Azilian Period appears the first round skull race. It comes clearly from the East. Later we shall find that this invasion of the forerunners of the existing Alpine race came from southwestern Asia by way of the Iranian plateau, Asia Minor, the Balkans and the valley of the Danube, and spread over nearly all of Europe. The earlier round skull invasions may as well have been infiltrations as armed conquests since apparently from that day to this the round skulls have occupied the poorer mountain districts and have seldom ventured down to the rich and fertile plains.
This new brachycephalic race is known as the Furfooz or Grenelle race, so called from the localities in Belgium and France where it was first discovered. Members of this round skull race have also been found at Ofnet in Bavaria where they occur in association with a dolichocephalic race, our first historic evidence of the mixture of contrasted races. The descendants of this Furfooz-Grenelle race and of the succeeding waves of invaders of the same brachycephalic type now occupy central Europe as Alpines and form the predominant peasant type in central and eastern Europe.
In this same Azilian Period there appear, coming this time from the South, the first forerunners of the Mediterranean race. The descendants of this earliest wave of Mediterraneans and their later reinforcements occupy all the coast and islands of the Mediterranean and are spread widely over western Europe. They can everywhere be identified by their short stature, slight build, long skull and brunet hair and eyes.
While during this Azilian-Tardenoisian Period these ancestors of two of the existing European races are appearing in central and southern Europe, a new culture phase, also distinctly Pre-Neolithic, was developing along the shores of the Baltic. It is known as Maglemose from its type locality in Denmark. It is believed to be the work of the first wave of the Nordic race which had followed the retreating glaciers northward over the old land connections between Denmark and Sweden to occupy the Scandinavian Peninsula. In the remains of this culture we find definite evidence of the domesticated dog.
With the appearance of the Mediterranean race the Azilian-Tardenoisian draws to its close and with it the entire Paleolithic Period. It is safe to assign for the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic or Polished Stone Age, the date of 7,000 or 8,000 B. C.
The races of the Paleolithic Period, so far as we can judge from their remains, appear successively on the scene with all their characters fully developed. The evolution of all these subspecies and races took place somewhere in Asia or eastern Europe. None of these races appear to be ancestral one to another, although the scanty remains of the Heidelberg Man would indicate that he may have given rise to the later Neanderthals. Other than this possible affinity, the various races of Paleolithic times are not related one to another.
III — The Neolithic and Bronze Ages
About 7,000 B.C. we enter an entirely new period in the history of man, the Neolithic or New Stone Age, when the flint implements were polished and not merely chipped. Early as is this date in European culture, we are not far from the beginnings of an elaborate civilization in parts of Asia and Egypt. The earliest organized governments, so far as our present knowledge goes, were Egypt and Sumer. Chinese civilization at the other end of Asia is later, but mystery still shrouds its origin and its connection, if any, with the Mesopotamian city-states. The solution probably lies in the central region of the Syr Darya and future excavations in those regions may uncover very early cultures. Balkh, the ancient Bactra, the mother of cities, is located where the trade routes between China, India and Mesopotamia converged and it is in this neighborhood that careful and thorough excavations will probably find their greatest reward.
However, we are not dealing with Asia but with Europe only and our knowledge is confined to the fact that the various cultural advances at the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic correspond with the arrival of new races.
The transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic was formerly considered as revolutionary, an abrupt change of both race and culture, but a period more or less transitory, known as the Campignian, now appears to bridge over this gap. This is only what should be expected, since in human archæology as in geology the more detailed our knowledge becomes the more gradually we find one period or horizon merges into its successor.
For a long time after the opening of the Neolithic the old-fashioned chipped weapons and implements remain the predominant type and the polished flints so characteristic of the Neolithic appear at first only sporadically, then increase in number until finally they entirely replace the rougher designs of the preceding Old Stone Age.
So in their turn these Neolithic polished stone implements, which ultimately became both varied and effective as weapons and tools, continued in use long after metallurgy developed. In the Bronze Period metal armor and weapons were for ages of the greatest value. So they were necessarily in the possession of the military and ruling classes only, while the unfortunate serf or common soldier who followed his master to war did the best he could with leather shield and stone weapons. In the ring that clustered around Harold for the last stand on Senlac Hill many of the English thanes died with their Saxon king, armed solely with the stone battle-axes of their ancestors.
In Italy also there was a long period known to the Italian archæologists as the Eneolithic Period when good flint tools existed side by side with very poor copper and bronze implements; so that, while the Neolithic lasted in western Europe four or five thousand years, it is, at its commencement, without clear definition from the preceding Paleolithic and at its end it merges gradually into the succeeding ages of metals.
After the opening Campignian phase there followed a long period typical of the Neolithic, known as the Robenhausian or Age of the Swiss Lake Dwellers, which reached its height after 5000 B. C. The lake dwellings seem to have been the work chiefly of the round skull Alpine races and are found in numbers throughout the region of the Alps and their foothills and along the valley of the Danube.
These Robenhausian pile built villages were the earliest known form of fixed habitation in Europe and the culture found in association with them was a great advance over that of the preceding Paleolithic. This type of permanent habitation flourished through the entire Upper Neolithic and the succeeding Bronze Age. Pile villages end in Switzerland with the first appearance of iron but elsewhere, as on the upper Danube, they still existed in the days of Herodotus.
Pottery is found together with domesticated animals and agriculture, which appear during the Robenhausian for the first time. The chase, supplemented by trapping and fishing, was still common but it probably was more for clothing than for food. A permanent site is not alone the basis of an agricultural community, but it also involves at least a partial abandonment of the chase, because only nomads can follow the game in its seasonal migrations and hunted animals soon leave the neighborhood of settlements.
The Terramara Period of northern Italy was a later phase of culture contemporaneous with the Upper Robenhausian and was typical of the Bronze Age. During the Terramara Period fortified and moated stations in swamps or close to the banks of rivers became the favorite resorts instead of pile villages built in lakes. The first traces of copper are found during this period. The earliest human remains in the Terramara deposits are long skulled, but round skulls soon appear in association with bronze implements. This indicates an original population of Mediterranean affinities overwhelmed later by Alpines.
Neolithic culture also flourished in the north of Europe and particularly in Scandinavia now free from ice. The coasts of the Baltic were apparently occupied for the first time at the very beginning of this period, as no trace of Paleolithic industry has been found there, other than the Maglemose, which represents only the very latest phase of the Old Stone Age. The kitchen middens, or refuse heaps, of Sweden and more particularly of Denmark date from the early Neolithic and thus are somewhat earlier than the lake dwellers. Rough pottery occurs in them for the first time, but no traces of agriculture have been found and, as said, the dog seems to have been the only domesticated animal.
From these two centres, the Alps and the North, an elaborate and variegated Neolithic culture spread through western Europe and an autochthonous development took place, comparatively little influenced by trade intercourse with Asia after the first immigrations of the new races.
We may assume that the distribution of races in Europe during the Neolithic was roughly as follows.
The Mediterranean basin and western Europe, including Spain, Italy, Gaul, Britain and parts of western Germany, were populated by Mediterranean long heads. In Britain the Paleolithic population must have been very small and the Neolithic Mediterraneans were the first effectively to open up the country. Even they kept to the open moorlands and avoided the heavily wooded and swampy valleys which to-day are the main centres of population. Before metal and especially iron tools were in use forests were an almost complete barrier to the expansion of an agricultural population.
The Alps and the territories immediately adjacent, with Central Gaul and much of the Balkans, were inhabited by Alpine types. These Alpines extended northward until they came in touch in eastern Germany and Poland with the southernmost Nordics, but as the Carpathians at a much later date, namely, from the fourth to the eighth century A. D., were the centre of radiation of the Alpine Slavs, it is very possible that during the Neolithic the early Nordics lay farther north and east.
North of the Alpines and occupying the shores of the Baltic and Scandinavia, together with eastern Germany, Poland and Russia, were located the Nordics. At the very base of the Neolithic and perhaps still earlier, this race occupied Scandinavia, and Sweden became the nursery of what has been generally called the Teutonic subdivision of the Nordic race. It was in that country that the peculiar characters of stature and blondness became most accentuated and it is there that we find them to-day in their greatest purity.
During the Neolithic the remnants of early Paleolithic man must have been numerous, but later they were either exterminated or absorbed by the existing European races.
During all this Neolithic Period Mesopotamia and Egypt were thousands of years in advance of Europe, but only a small amount of culture from these sources seems to have trickled westward up the valley of the Danube, then and long afterward the main route of intercourse between western Asia and the heart of Europe. Some trade also passed from the Black Sea up the Russian rivers to the Baltic coasts. Along these latter routes there came from the north to the Mediterranean world the amber of the Baltic, a fossil resin greatly prized by early man for its magic electrical qualities.
Gold was probably the first metal to attract the attention of primitive man, but could only be used for purposes of ornamentation. Copper, which is often found in a pure state, was also one of the earliest metals known and probably came first either from the mines of Cyprus or of the Sinai Peninsula. These latter mines are known to have been worked before 3400 B. C. by systematic mining operations and much earlier “the metal must have been obtained by primitive methods from surface ore.” It is, therefore, probable that copper was known and used, at first for ornament and later for implements, in Egypt before 4000 B. C. and possibly even earlier in the Mesopotamian regions.
We now reach the confines of recorded history and the first absolutely fixed date, 4241 B. C., is established for lower Egypt by the oldest known calendar. The earliest date as yet for Mesopotamia is somewhat later, but these two countries supply the basis of the chronology of the ancient world until a few centuries before Christ.
With the use of copper the Neolithic fades to its end and the Bronze Age commences soon thereafter. This next step in advance was made apparently before 3000 B. C. when some unknown genius discovered that an amalgam of nine parts of copper to one part of tin would produce the metal we now call bronze, which has a texture and hardness suitable for weapons and tools. The discovery revolutionized the world. The new knowledge was a long time spreading and weapons of this material were of fabulous value, especially in countries where there were no native mines and where spears and swords could only be obtained through trade or conquest. The esteem in which these bronze weapons, and still more the later weapons of iron, were held, is indicated by the innumerable legends and myths concerning magic swords and armor, the possession of which made the owner well-nigh invulnerable and invincible.
The necessity of obtaining tin for this amalgam led to the early voyages of the Phœnicians, who from the cities of Tyre and Sidon and their daughter Carthage traversed the entire length of the Mediterranean, founded colonies in Spain to work the Spanish tin mines, passed the Pillars of Hercules and finally voyaged through the stormy Atlantic to the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles of Ultima Thule. There, on the coasts of Cornwall, they traded with the native British of kindred Mediterranean race for the precious tin. These dangerous and costly voyages become explicable only if the value of this metal for the composition of bronze be taken into consideration.
After these bronze weapons were elaborated in Egypt the knowledge of their manufacture and use was extended through conquest into Palestine, and northward into Asia Minor.
The effect of the possession of these new weapons on the Alpine populations of western Asia was magical and resulted in an intensive and final expansion of round skulls into Europe. This invasion came through Asia Minor, the Balkans and the valley of the Danube, poured into Italy from the north, introduced bronze among the earlier Alpine lake dwellers of Switzerland and among the Mediterraneans of the Terramara stations of the valley of the Po and at a later date reached as far west as Britain and as far north as Holland and Norway, where its traces are still to be found among the living population.
The simultaneous appearance of bronze about 3000 or 2800 B. C. in the south as well as in the north of Italy may possibly be attributed to a lateral wave of this same invasion which, passing through Egypt, where it left behind the so-called Gizeh round skulls, reached Tunis and Sicily. In southern Italy bronze may have been introduced from Crete. With the first knowledge of metals begins the Eneolithic Period of the Italians.
The close resemblance in design and technique among the implements of the Bronze Age in widely separated localities is so great that we can infer a relatively simultaneous introduction.
With the introduction of bronze the custom of incineration of the dead also appears and replaces the typical Neolithic custom of inhumation.
The introduction of bronze into England and into Scandinavia may be safely dated about one thousand years later, after 1800 B. C. The fact that the Alpines only barely reached Ireland indicates that at this time that island was severed from England and that the land connection between England and France had been broken. The computation of the foregoing dates, of course, is somewhat hypothetical, but the fixed fact remains that this last expansion of the Alpines brought the knowledge of bronze to western and northern Europe and to the Mediterranean and Nordic peoples living there.
The effect of the introduction of bronze in the areas occupied chiefly by the Mediterranean race along the Atlantic coast and in Britain, as well as in north Africa from Tunis to Morocco, is seen in the construction and in the wide distribution of the megalithic funeral monuments, which appear to have been erected, not by Alpines but by the dolichocephs. The occurrence of bronze tools and weapons in the interments shows clearly that the megaliths of the south of France date from the beginning of the Bronze Age. The absence of bronze from the dolmens of Brittany may indicate an earlier age. It is, however, more likely that the opening Bronze Age in the South was contemporary with the late Neolithic in the North. The construction and use of these monuments continued at least until the very earliest trace of iron appears and in fact mound burials among the Vikings were common until the introduction of Christianity.
Although there is evidence of very early use of iron in Egypt the knowledge of this metal as well as of bronze in Europe centres around the area occupied by the Alpines in the eastern Alps and its earliest phase is known as the Hallstatt culture, from a little town in the Tyrol where it was first discovered. This Hallstatt iron culture appeared about 1500 B. C. The Alpine Hittites in northeast Asia Minor were probably the first to mine and smelt iron and they introduced it to the Alpines of eastern Europe, but it was the Nordics who benefited by its use. Bronze weapons and the later iron ones proved in the hands of these Northern barbarians to be of terrible effectiveness. With these metal swords in their grasp, the Nordics conquered the Alpines of central Europe and then suddenly entered the ancient world as raiders and destroyers of cities. The classic civilizations of the northern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea fell, one after another, before the “Furor Normanorum,” just as two thousand years later the provinces of Rome were devastated by the last great flood of the Nordics from beyond the Alps.
The first Nordics to appear in European history are tribes speaking Aryan tongues in the form of the various Celtic and related dialects in the West, of Umbrian in Italy and of Thracian in the Balkans. These barbarians, pouring down from the North, swept with them large numbers of Alpines whom they had already thoroughly Nordicized. The process of conquering and assimilating the Alpines must have gone on for long centuries before our first historic records and the work was so thoroughly done that the very existence of this Alpine race as a separate subspecies of man was actually forgotten for many centuries by themselves and by the world at large until it was revealed in our own day by the science of skull measurements.
The Hallstatt iron culture did not extend into western Europe and the smelting and extensive use of this metal in southern Britain and northwestern Europe are of much later date and occur in what is called the La Tène Period, usually assigned to the fifth and fourth century B. C.
Iron weapons were, however, known sporadically in England much earlier, perhaps as far back as 800 B. C., but were very rare and were probably importations from the Continent.
“Hallstatt relics have only been found in the northeast or centre of France and it appears that the Bronze Age continued in the remainder of that country until about 700 B. C.”
The spread of this La Tène culture is associated with the Nordic Cymry, who constituted the last wave of Celtic-speaking invaders into western Europe, while the earlier Nordic Gauls and Goidels had arrived in Gaul and Britain equipped with bronze only.
In Roman times, following the La Tène Period, the main races of Europe occupied the relative positions which they had held during the whole Neolithic Period and which they hold to-day, with the exception that the Nordic subspecies was less extensively represented in western Europe than when, a few hundred years later, the so-called Teutonic tribes overran these countries; but on the other hand, the Nordics occupied large areas in eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland and Russia now mainly occupied by the Slavs of Alpine race.
Many countries in central Europe were in Roman times inhabited by fair-haired, blue eyed barbarians, where now the population is preponderantly brunet and becoming yearly more so.
| CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE2 | ||
|---|---|---|
| METALS | ||
| Later Iron | ||
| La Tène Culture | Europe | 500 B. C.—Roman times |
| Early Iron | ||
| Hallstatt Culture | Europe | 1500–500 B. C. |
| Orient | 1800–1000 B. C. | |
| Bronze | Western and northern Europe | 1800–500 B. C. |
| Orient | 3000–2000 B. C. | |
| NEOLITHIC | ||
| Late Neolithic Copper, Eneolithic | 3000–2000 B. C. | |
| Typical Neolithic | Swiss lake dwellings, Robenhausian culture | 5000 B. C. |
| Early Neolithic | Campignian culture | 7000 B. C. |
| UPPER PALEOLITHIC | ||
| Postglacial | Caves and shelters: | |
| Azilian-Tardenoisian Nordic-Maglemose Furfooz-Grenelle race Proto-Mediterranean race | 10,000–7000 B. C. | |
| Magdalenian Cro-Magnon race | 16,000–10,000 B. C. | |
| Solutrean Brünn-Předmost race Cro-Magnon race | 25,000–16,000 B. C. | |
| Aurignacian Cro-Magnon race | ||
| MIDDLE PALEOLITHIC | ||
| IV. Glaciation | ||
| Würm | Mousterian Neanderthal race Caves and shelters | 50,000–25,000 B. C. |
| LOWER PALEOLITHIC | ||
| III. Interglacial | ||
| Riss-Würm | Acheulean, river terraces | 75,000 B. C. |
| Chellean, river terraces | 100,000 B. C. | |
| Pre-Chellean and Mesvinian, river terraces | 125,000 B. C. 150,000 B. C. | |
| EOLITHIC | ||
| III. Glaciation | ||
| Riss | 200,000–150,000 B. C. | |
| II. Interglacial | ||
| Mindel-Riss | Heidelberg Man | 350,000–200,000 B. C. |
| II. Glaciation | ||
| Mindel | 400,000–350,000 B. C. | |
| I. Interglacial | ||
| Günz-Mindel | 475,000–400,000 B. C. | |
| Glaciation | ||
| Günz | Pithecanthropus | 500,000–475,000 B. C. |
IV — The Alpine Race
The Alpine race is clearly of Eastern and Asiatic origin. It forms the westernmost extension of a widespread subspecies which, outside of Europe, occupies Asia Minor, Iran, the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush. In fact the western Himalayas were probably its original centre of evolution and radiation and among its Asiatic members is a distinct subdivision, the Armenoids.
The Alpine race is distinguished by a round face and correspondingly round skull which in the true Armenians has a peculiar sugarloaf shape, a character which can be easily recognized. The Alpines must not be confounded with the slit-eyed Mongols who centre around Thibet and the steppes of north Asia. The fact that both these races are round skulled does not involve identity of origin any more than the long skulls of the Nordics and of the Mediterraneans require that they be both considered of the same subspecies, although good anthropologists have been misled by this parallelism. The Alpines are of stocky build and moderately short stature, except sometimes where they have been crossed with Nordic elements. This race is also characterized by dark hair, except where there has been a strong Nordic admixture as in south Germany and Switzerland. In Europe at the present time the eye, also, is usually dark but sometimes grayish. The ancestral Proto-Alpines from the highlands of western Asia must, of course, have had brunet eyes and very dark, probably black, hair. Whether we are justified in considering gray eyes as peculiar to populations of mixed Alpine and Nordic blood is difficult to determine, but one thing is certain, the combination of blue eyes and flaxen hair is never Alpine.
The European Alpines retain very little evidence of their Asiatic origin except the skull shape and have been in contact with the Nordic race so long that in central and western Europe they are everywhere saturated with the blood of that race. Many populations now considered good Germans, such as the majority of the Würtembergers, Bavarians, Austrians, Swiss and Tyrolese are merely Nordicized Alpines.
While the Swiss are to-day neither tall nor long-headed, their country was thoroughly conquered early in the Christian era by the Nordic Alemanni who entered from the Rhine Valley. The exodus of soldiers from the forest cantons throughout the Middle Ages to fight as mercenaries in France and Italy gradually drained off this Nordic element until the chief evidence of its former existence lies to-day in the large amount of blondness among the Swiss. With the loss of this type the nation has ceased to be a military community.
The first appearance in Europe of the Alpines dates from the Azilian Period when it is represented by the Furfooz-Grenelle race. There were later several invasions of this race which entered Europe from the Asia Minor plateaux, by way of the Balkans and the valley of the Danube, during Neolithic times and, also, at the beginning of the Bronze Age. It appears also to have passed north of the Black Sea, as some slight traces have been discovered there of round skulls which long antedate the existing population but the Russian brachycephaly of to-day is of much later origin and is due mainly to the eastward spread of Alpines from the regions of the Carpathians since the first centuries of our era.
This race in its final expansion far to the northwest ultimately reached Norway, Denmark and Holland and planted among the dolichocephalic natives small colonies of round skulls, which still exist. These colonies are found along the coast and while of small extent are clearly marked. On the southwestern seaboard of Norway these round heads are dark and relatively short.
When this invasion reached the extreme northwest of Europe its energy was spent and the invaders were soon forced back into central Europe by the Nordics. The Alpines at this time of maximum extension about 1800 B. C. crossed into Britain and a few reached Ireland and introduced bronze into both these islands. As the metal appears about the same time in Sweden it is safe to assume that it was introduced by this invasion.
The men of the Round Barrows in England were Alpines, but their numbers were so scanty that they have left behind them in the skulls of the living population but little demonstrable evidence of their former presence. If we are ever able accurately to analyze the various strains that enter in more or less minute quantities into the blood of the British nation, we shall find many traces of these Round Barrow men as well as other interesting and ancient remnants especially in the western isles and peninsulas.
In the study of European populations the great and fundamental fact about the British Isles is the almost total absence there to-day of true Alpine round skulls. It is the only important state in Europe in which the round skulls play no part and the only nation of any rank composed solely of Nordic and Mediterranean races in approximately equal numbers. To this fact are undoubtedly due many of the individualities and much of the greatness of the English people.
The cephalic index in England is rather low, about 78, but there is a type of tall men, with a tendency to roundheadedness allied to a very marked intellectual capacity, known as the “Beaker Maker” type. They are probably descended from the men of the Round Barrows, who while brachycephalic were tall and presumably dark and entered England on the east and northeast. The Beaker Makers appear at the very end of the Neolithic and, at least in the case of the last of them to arrive, are identified with the Bronze Age.
Before this tall, round-headed type reached Britain, they had absorbed many Nordic elements and they have nothing except the skull shape in common with the Alpines living closest, those of Belgium and France. However, they do suggest strongly the Dinaric race of the Tyrol and Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. In addition to the Beaker Makers remains of short, thick-set brachycephs have also been found in small numbers. These last appear to have been true Alpines.
The invasion of central Europe by Alpines, which occurred in the Neolithic, following in the wake of the Azilian forerunners of the same type—the Furfooz-Grenelle race—represented a very great advance in culture. They brought with them from Asia the art of domesticating animals and the first knowledge of the cereals and of pottery and were an agricultural race in sharp contrast to the flesh eating hunters who preceded them.
The Neolithic populations of the lake dwellings in Switzerland and the extreme north of Italy, which flourished about 5000 B. C., all belonged to this Alpine race. A comparison of the scanty physical remains of these lake dwellers with the inhabitants of the existing villages on the lake shores demonstrates that the skull shape has changed little or not at all during the last seven thousand years and affords us another proof of the persistency of physical characters.
This Alpine race in Europe is now so thoroughly acclimated that it is no longer Asiatic in any respect and has nothing in common with the Mongols except its round skulls. Such Mongolian elements as exist to-day in scattered groups throughout eastern Europe are remnants of the later invasions of Tatar hordes which, beginning with Attila in the fifth century, ravaged eastern Europe for hundreds of years.
In western and central Europe the present distribution of the Alpine race is a substantial recession from its earlier extent and it has been everywhere conquered and subordinated by Celtic- and Teutonic-speaking Nordics. Beginning with the first appearance of the Celtic-speaking Nordics in western Europe, the Alpine race has been obliged to give ground but has mingled its blood everywhere with the conquerors and now after centuries of obscurity it appears to be increasing again at the expense of the master race.
The Alpines reached Spain, as they reached Britain, in small numbers and with spent force but they still persist along the Cantabrian Alps as well as among the French Basques on the northern side of the Pyrenees.
The Anaryan Basque or Euskarian language may be a derivative of the original speech of these Alpines, as its affinities point eastward and toward Asia rather than southward and toward the littoral of Africa and the Hamitic speech of the Mediterranean Berbers. Basque was probably related to the extinct Aquitanian. The Ligurian language, also seemingly Anaryan, if ever closely deciphered may throw some light on the subject. There are dim traces all along the north African coast of a round skull invasion about 3000 B. C. through Syria, Egypt, Tripoli and Tunis and from there through Sicily to southern Italy.
The Alpine race forms to-day, as in Cæsar’s time, the great bulk of the population of central France with a Nordic aristocracy resting upon it. They occupy as the lower classes the uplands of Belgium, where, known as Walloons, they speak an archaic French dialect closely related to the ancient langue d’oïl. They form a majority of the upland population of Alsace, Lorraine, Baden, Würtemberg, Bavaria, Tyrol, Switzerland and northern Italy; in short, of the entire central massif of Europe. In Bavaria and the Tyrol the Alpines are so thoroughly Nordicized that their true racial affinities are betrayed by their round skulls alone.
When we reach Austria we come in contact with the Slavic-speaking nations which form a subdivision of the Alpine race appearing relatively late in history and radiating from the Carpathian Mountains. In western and central Europe in relation to the Nordic race the Alpine is everywhere the ancient, underlying and submerged type. The fertile lands, river valleys and cities are here in the hands of the Nordics but in eastern Germany and Poland we find conditions reversed. That is an old Nordic broodland with a Nordic substratum underlying the bulk of the peasantry, which now consists of round skulled Alpine Slavs. On top of these again we have an aristocratic upper class of comparatively recent introduction and of Saxon origin in eastern Germany. In Austria this upper class is Swabian and Bavarian.
The introduction of Slavs into eastern Germany is believed to have been by infiltration and not by conquest. In the fourth century these Wends were called Venethi, Antes and Sclaveni, and were described as strong in numbers but despised in war. Through the neglect of the Teutons they had been allowed to range far and wide from their homes near the northeastern Carpathians and to occupy the lands formerly belonging to the Nordic nations, who had abandoned their country and flocked into the Roman Empire. Goth, Burgund, Lombard and Vandal were replaced by the lowly Wend and Sorb, whose descendants to-day form the privates in the east German regiments, while the officers are everywhere recruited from the Nordic upper class. The mediæval relation of these Slavic tribes to the dominant Teuton is well expressed in the meaning—slave—which has been attached to their name in western languages.
The occupation of eastern Germany and Poland by the Slavs probably occurred from 400 A. D. to 700 A. D. but these Alpine elements were reinforced from the east and south from time to time during the succeeding centuries. Beginning early in the tenth century, the Saxons under their Emperors, especially Henry the Fowler, turned their attention eastward and during the next two centuries they reconquered and thoroughly Germanized all this section of Europe.
A similar series of changes in racial predominance took place in Russia where in addition to a nobility largely Nordic a section of the population is of ancient Nordic type, although the bulk of the peasantry consists of Alpine Slavs.
The Alpines in eastern Europe are represented by various branches of the “Slavic” nations. Their area of distribution was split into two sections by the occupation of the great Dacian plain first by the Avars about 600 A. D. and later by the Hungarians about 900 A. D. These Avars and Magyars came from somewhere in eastern Russia beyond the sphere of Aryan speech and their invasions separated the northern Slavs, known as Wends, Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles, from the southern Slavs, known as Serbs and Croats. These southern Slavs entered the Balkan Peninsula in the sixth century from the northeast and to-day form the great mass of the population there.
The centre of radiation of all these Slavic-speaking Alpines was located in the Carpathians, especially the Ruthenian districts of Galicia and eastward to the neighborhood of the Pripet swamps and the head-waters of the Dnieper in Polesia, where the Slavic dialects are believed to have developed and whence they spread throughout Russia about the eighth century. These early Slavs were probably the Sarmatians of the Greek and Roman writers. Their name “Venethi” seems to have been a later designation. The original Proto-Slavic language being Aryan must have been at some distant date imposed by Nordics upon the Alpines, but its development into the present Slavic tongues was chiefly the work of Alpines.
In other words, the expansion of the Alpines of the Slavic-speaking group seems to have occurred after the Fourth Century and they have spread in the East over areas which were originally Nordic, very much as the Teutons had previously overrun and submerged the earlier Alpines in the West. The Mongol, Tatar and Turk who invaded Europe much later reinforced the brachycephalic element in these countries. To some extent the round skulled Alpines in Russia have been reinforced by way of the Caucasus and the route north of the Black Sea by their kindred in western Asia. The greater part of the purely Asiatic types has been thoroughly absorbed and Europeanized except in certain localities in Russia more especially in the east and south, where Mongoloid tribes such as the Mordvins, Bashkirs and Kalmucks have maintained their type either in isolated and relatively large groups or side by side with their Slavic neighbors. In both cases the isolation is maintained through religious and social differences.
The Avars preceded the Magyars in Hungary, but they have merged with the latter without leaving traces that can be identified. Certain Mongoloid characters found in Bulgaria are believed, however, to be of Avar origin.
The original physical type of the Magyars and the European Turks has now practically vanished as a result of prolonged intermarriage with the original inhabitants of Hungary and the Balkans. These tribes have left little behind but their language and, in the case of the Turks, their religion. The brachycephalic Hungarians to-day resemble the Austrian Germans much more than they do the Slavic-speaking populations adjoining them on the north and south or the Rumanians on the east.
Driven onward by the Avars, the Bulgars appeared south of the Danube about the end of the seventh century, coming originally from eastern Russia where the remnants of their kindred still persist along the Volga. To-day they conform physically in the western half of the country to the Alpine Serbs and in the eastern half to the Mediterranean race, as do also the Rumanians of the Black Sea coast.
Little or nothing remains of the ancestral Bulgars except their name. Language, religion and nearly, but not quite all, of the physical type have disappeared.
The early members of the Nordic race in order to reach the Mediterranean world had to pass through the Alpine populations and must have absorbed a certain amount of Alpine blood. Therefore the Umbrians in Italy and the Gauls of western Europe, while predominantly Nordic, were more mixed especially in the lower classes with Alpine blood than were the Belgæ or Cymry or their successors, the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Alemanni, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Danes and Northmen, all of whom appear in history as Nordics of the so-called Teutonic group.
In some portions of their range notably Savoy and central France the Alpine race is much less affected by Nordic influence than elsewhere but on the contrary it shows signs of a very ancient admixture with Mediterranean and even earlier elements. Brachycephalic Alpine populations in comparative purity still exist in the interior of Brittany as in Auvergne, although nearly surrounded by Nordic populations.
While the Alpines were everywhere overwhelmed and driven to the fastnesses of the mountains, the warlike and restless nature of the Nordics has enabled the more stable Alpine population to reassert itself slowly, and Europe is probably much less Nordic to-day than it was fifteen hundred years ago.
The early Alpines made very large contributions to the civilization of the world and were the medium through which many advances in culture were introduced from Asia into Europe. This race at the time of its first appearance in the west brought to the nomad hunters a knowledge of agriculture and of primitive pottery and of domestication of animals and thus made possible a great increase in population and the establishment of permanent settlements. Still later its final expansion was the means through which the knowledge of metals reached the Mediterranean and Nordic populations of the west and north. Upon the appearance on the scene of the Nordics the Alpine race temporarily lost its identity and sank to the subordinate and obscure position which it still largely occupies.
In western Asia members of this race seemingly are entitled to the honor of the earliest Mesopotamian civilization of which we have knowledge, namely, that of Sumer and its northerly neighbor Accad in Mesopotamia. It is also the race of early Elam and Media. In fact, the basis of Mesopotamian civilization belongs to this race. Later Babylonia and Assyria were Arabic and Semitic while Persia was Nordic and Aryan.
In classic, mediæval and modern times the Alpines have played an unimportant part in European culture and in western Europe they have been so thoroughly Nordicized that they exist rather as an element in Nordic race development than as an independent type. There are, however, many indications in current history which point to an impending development of civilization in the Slavic branches of this race and the world must be prepared to face changes in the Russias which will, for good or for evil, bring them more closely into touch with western Europe.
V — The Mediterranean Race
The Mediterranean subspecies formerly called the Iberian is a relatively small, light boned, long skulled race, of brunet coloring, becoming even swarthy in certain portions of its range. Throughout Neolithic times and possibly still earlier it seems to have occupied, as it does to-day, all the shores of the Mediterranean including the coast of Africa from Morocco on the west to Egypt on the east. The Mediterraneans are the western members of a subspecies of man which forms a substantial part of the population of Persia, Afghanistan, Baluchistan and Hindustan with perhaps a southward extension into Ceylon.
The Aryanized Afghan and Hindu of northern India speak languages derived from Old Sanskrit and are distantly related to the Mediterranean race. Aside from a common dolichocephaly these peoples are entirely distinct from the Dravidians of south India whose speech is agglutinative and who show strong evidence of profound mixture with the ancient Negrito substratum of southern Asia.
Everywhere throughout the Asiatic portion of its range the Mediterranean race overlies an even more ancient Negroid race. These Negroids still have representatives among the Pre-Dravidians of India, the Veddahs of Ceylon, the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula and the natives of the Andaman Islands.
This Mediterranean subspecies at the close of the Paleolithic spread from the basin of the Inland Sea northward by way of Spain throughout westernmost Europe including the British Isles and, before the final expansion of the Alpines, was widely distributed up to and, possibly, touching the domain of the Nordic dolichocephs. The Mediterraneans did not cross the Alps from the south but spread around the mountains. In attaining to Britain from Spain by way of Central France it is probable that they swept with them Paleolithic remnants from the ancient centre of population in the Auvergne district.
In all this vast range from the British Isles to Hindustan, it is not to be supposed that there is absolute identity of race. Certain portions, however, of the populations of the countries throughout this long stretch do show in their physique clear indications of descent from a Neolithic race of a common original type, which we may call Proto-Mediterranean.
Quite apart from inevitable admixture with late Nordic and early Paleolithic elements, the brunet type of Englishman has had perhaps ten thousand years of independent evolution during which he has undergone selection due to the climatic and physical conditions of his northern habitat. The result is that he has specialized far away from the Proto-Mediterranean race which contributed his blood originally to Britain while it was, probably, still part of continental Europe.
At the other end of their range in India this race, the Mediterraneans, have been crossed with Dravidians and with Pre-Dravidian Negroids. They have also had imposed upon them other ethnic elements which came over through the Afghan passes from the northwest. The resultant racial mixture in India has had its own line of specialization. Residence in the fertile but unhealthy river bottoms, the direct rays of a tropic sun and competition with the immemorial autochthones have unsparingly weeded generation after generation until the existing Hindu has little in common with the ancestral Proto-Mediterranean.
It is to the Mediterranean race in the British Isles that the English, Scotch and Americans owe whatever brunet characters they possess. In western Europe, wherever it exists, it appears to underlie the Alpine race and, in fact, wherever this race is in contact with either the Alpines or the Nordics it would seem to represent the more ancient stratum of the population.
So far as we know this Mediterranean type never existed in Scandinavia and all brunet elements found there can be attributed to introductions in the Bronze Age or in historic times. Nor did the Mediterranean race ever enter or cross the high Alps as did the Nordics at a much later date on their way to the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic coasts.
The Mediterranean race with its Asiatic extensions is bordered everywhere on the north of its enormous range from Spain to India by round skulls but there does not seem to be as much evidence of mixture between these two subspecies of man as there is between the Alpines and the Nordics.
Along its southern boundary the Mediterraneans are in contact with either the long skulled Negroes of Africa or the ancient Negrito population of southern Asia. In Africa this race has drifted southward over the Sahara and up the Nile Valley and has modified the blood of the Negroes in both the Senegambian and equatorial regions.
Beyond these mixtures of blood, there is absolutely no relationship between the Mediterranean race and the Negroes. The fact that the Mediterranean race is long skulled as well as the Negro does not indicate relationship as has been suggested. An overemphasis of the importance of the skull shape as a somatological character can easily mislead and characters other than skull proportions must be carefully considered in determining race.
From a zoological point of view Africa north of the Sahara is now and has been since early Tertiary times a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians while the ancient Egyptians and their modern descendants, the fellaheen, are merely well-marked varieties of this Mediterranean race.
The Egyptians fade off toward the west into the so-called Hamitic peoples (to use an obsolete name) of Libya, and toward the south the infusion of Negro blood becomes increasingly great until we finally reach the pure Negro. On the east in Arabia we find an ancient and highly specialized subdivision of the Mediterranean race, which has from time out of mind crossed the Red Sea and infused its blood into the Negroes of east Africa.
To-day the Mediterranean race forms in Europe a substantial part of the population of the British Isles, the great bulk of the population of the Iberian Peninsula, nearly one-third of the population of France, Liguria, Italy south of the Apennines and all the Mediterranean coasts and islands, in some of which like Sardinia it exists in great purity. It forms the substratum of the population of Greece and of the eastern coast of the Balkan Peninsula. Everywhere in the interior of the Balkan Peninsula, except in eastern Bulgaria and parts of Rumania, it has been replaced by the South Slavs and by the Albanians, the latter a mixture of the ancient Illyrians and the Slavs.
In the British Isles the Mediterranean race represents the Pre-Nordic population and exists in considerable numbers in Wales and in certain portions of England, notably in the Fen districts to the northeast of London. In Scotland it is far less marked, but has left its brunetness as an indication of its former prevalence and this dark hair and eye color is very often associated with tall stature.
This is the race that gave the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phœnicia including Carthage, of Etruria, of Mycenæan Greece, of Assyria and much of Babylonia. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, which probably predominated in the upper and ruling classes and imposed their guidance upon the masses, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman state.
To what extent the Mediterranean race entered into the blood and civilization of Rome, it is now difficult to say, but the traditions of the Eternal City, its love of organization, of law and military efficiency, as well as the Roman ideals of family life, of loyalty and truth, point clearly to a northern rather than to a Mediterranean origin, although there must have been some Alpine strains mixed in with the Nordic element.
The struggles in early Rome between Latin and Etruscan and the endless quarrels between patrician and plebeian may have arisen from this existence in Rome, side by side, of two distinct and clashing races, probably Nordic and Mediterranean respectively. The Roman busts that have come down to us often show features of a very Anglo-Saxon cast but with a somewhat round head. The Romans were short in stature in comparison with the nations north of the Alps and in the recently discovered battlefield of the Teutoburgian Forest where Varus and his legions perished in the reign of Augustus the skeletons of the Romans, identified by their armor, were notably smaller and slighter than were those of the German victors. The indications on the whole point to a Nordic aristocracy in Rome with some Alpine elements. The Plebs, on the other hand, was largely Mediterranean and Oriental and finally in the last days of the Republic ceased to contain any purely Roman blood.
The northern qualities of Rome are in sharp contrast to the less European traits of the classic Greeks, whose volatile and analytical spirit, lack of cohesion, political incapacity and ready resort to treason all point clearly to southern and eastern affinities.
While very ancient, located for probably ten thousand years in western and southern Europe, and even longer on the south shore of the Mediterranean, nevertheless this subspecies cannot be called purely European. Its occupation of the north coast of Africa and the west coast of Europe can be traced everywhere by its beautifully polished stone weapons and tools. The megalithic monuments also, which are found in association with this race, may mark its line of advance in western Europe, although they extend beyond the range of the Mediterraneans into the domain of the Scandinavian Nordics. These huge stone structures were chiefly sepulchral memorials and are very suggestive of the Egyptian funeral monuments. They date back to the first knowledge of the manufacture and use of bronze tools by the Mediterranean race. They occur in great numbers, size and variety along the north coast of Africa and up the Atlantic seaboard through Spain, Brittany and England to Scandinavia.
It is admitted that the various groups of the Mediterranean race did not speak in the first instance any form of Aryan tongue and we know that these languages were introduced into the Mediterranean world by invaders from the north.
In Spain the language of the Nordic invaders was Celtic and is believed to have nearly died out by Roman times. Its remnants and the ancient speech of the natives were in turn superseded, along with the Phœnician spoken in some of the southern coast towns, by the Latin of the conquering Roman. Latin mixed with some small elements of Gothic construction and Arabic vocabulary forms to-day the basis of modern Portuguese, Castilian and Catalan.
The native Mediterranean race of the Iberian Peninsula quickly absorbed the blood of these Celtic-speaking Nordic Gauls, just as it later diluted beyond recognition the vigorous physical characters of the Nordic Vandals, Suevi and Visigoths. A certain amount of Nordic blood still persists to-day in northern Spain, especially in Galicia and along the Pyrenees, as well as generally among the upper classes. According to classic writers there were light and dark types in Spain in Roman times. The Romans left no evidence of their domination except in their language and religion; while the earlier Phœnicians on the coasts and the later swarms of Moors and Arabs all over the peninsula, but chiefly in the south, were closely related by race to the native Iberians.
That portion of the Mediterranean race which inhabits southern France occupies most of the territory of ancient Languedoc and Provence and it was these Provençals who developed and preserved during the Middle Ages the romantic civilization of the Albigensians, a survival of classic culture which was drowned in blood by a crusade from the north in the thirteenth century.
In northern Italy only the coast of Liguria is occupied by the Mediterranean race. In the valley of the Po the Mediterraneans predominated during the early Neolithic but with the introduction of bronze the Alpines appear and round skulls to this day prevail north of the Apennines. About 1100 B. C. the Nordic Umbrians and Oscans swept over the Alps from the northeast, conquered northern Italy and introduced their Aryan speech, which gradually spread southward. The Umbrian state was afterward overwhelmed by the Tyrrhenians or Etruscans, who were of Mediterranean race and who, by 800 B. C. had extended their empire northward to the Alps and temporarily checked the advance of the Nordics. In the sixth century B. C. new swarms of Nordics, coming this time from Gaul and speaking Celtic dialects, seized the valley of the Po and in 382 B. C. these Gauls, heavily reinforced from the north and under the leadership of Brennus, stormed Rome and completely destroyed the Etruscan power. From that time onward the valley of the Po became known as Cisalpine Gaul. Mixed with other Nordic elements, chiefly Gothic and Lombard, this population persists to this day, and is the backbone of modern Italy.
A continuation of this movement of these Gauls, or Galatians as the Greek world called them, starting from northern Italy occurred a century later when these Nordics suddenly appeared before Delphi in Greece in 279 B. C. and then crossed into Asia Minor and founded the state called Galatia, which endured until Christian times.
South Italy until its conquest by Rome was Magna Græcia and the population to-day retains many Pelasgian Greek elements. It is among these classic remnants that artists search for the handsomest specimens of the Mediterranean race. In Sicily also the race is purely Mediterranean in spite of the admixture of types coming from the neighboring coasts of Tunis. These intrusive elements, however, were all of kindred race. Traces of Alpines in these regions and on the adjoining African coast are very scarce and wherever found may be referred to the final wave of round skull invasion which introduced bronze into Europe.
In Greece the Mediterranean Pelasgians speaking a Non-Aryan tongue were conquered by the Nordic Achæans, who entered from the northeast according to tradition prior to 1250 B. C. probably between 1400 and 1300 B. C. Doubtless there were still earlier waves of these same Nordic invaders as far back as 1700 B. C., which was a period of general unrest and migration throughout the ancient world.
The Nordic Achæans and Mediterranean Pelasgians as yet unmixed stand out in clear contrast in the Homeric account of the ten year siege of Troy, which is generally assigned to the date of 1194 to 1184 B. C.
The same invasion that brought the Achæans into Greece brought a related Nordic people to the coast of Asia Minor, known as Phrygians. Of this race were the Trojan leaders.
Both the Trojans and the Greeks were commanded by huge blond princes, the heroes of Homer—in fact, even the Gods were fair-haired—while the bulk of the armies on both sides was composed of little brunet Pelasgians, imperfectly armed and remorselessly butchered by the leaders on either side. The only common soldiers mentioned by Homer as of the same race as the heroes were the Myrmidons of Achilles.
About the time that the Achæans and the Pelasgians began to amalgamate, new hordes of Nordic barbarians collectively called Hellenes entered from the northern mountains and destroyed this old Homeric-Mycenæan civilization. This Dorian invasion took place a little before 1100 B. C. and brought in the three main Nordic strains of Greece, the Dorian, the Æolian and the Ionian groups, which remain more or less distinct and separate throughout Greek history. Among these Nordics the Dorians may have included some Alpine elements. It is more than probable that this invasion or swarming of Nordics into Greece was part of the same general racial upheaval that brought the Umbrians and Oscans into Italy.
Long years of intense and bitter conflict follow between the old population and the newcomers and when the turmoil of this revolution settled down classic Greece appears. What was left of the Achæans retired to the northern Peloponnesus and the survivors of the early Pelasgian population remained in Messenia serving as helots their Spartan masters. The Greek colonies in Asia Minor were founded largely by refugees fleeing from these Dorian invaders.
The Pelasgian strain seems to have persisted best in Attica and the Ionian states. The Dorian Spartans appear to have retained more of the character of the northern barbarians than the Ionian Greeks but the splendid civilization of Hellas was due to a fusion of the two elements, the Achæan and Hellene of Nordic and the Pelasgian of Mediterranean race.
The contrast between Dorian Sparta and Ionian Athens, between the military efficiency, thorough organization and sacrifice of the citizen for the welfare of the state, which constituted the basis of Lacedæmonian power, and the Attic brilliancy, instability and extreme development of individualism, is strikingly like the contrast between Prussia with its Spartan-like culture and France with its Athenian versatility.
To this mixture of races in classic Greece the Mediterranean Pelasgians contributed their Mycenæan culture and the Nordic Achæans and Hellenes contributed their Aryan language, fighting efficiency and the European aspect of Greek life.
The first result of a crossing of two such contrasted subspecies as the Nordic and Mediterranean races has repeatedly been a new outburst of civilization. This occurs as soon as the older race has imparted to the conquerors its culture and before the victors have allowed their blood to be attenuated by mixture. This process seems to have happened several times in Greece.
Later, in 338 B. C., when the original Nordic blood had been hopelessly diluted by mixture with the ancient Mediterranean elements, Hellas fell an easy prey to Macedon. The troops of Philip and Alexander were Nordic and represented the uncultured but unmixed ancestral type of the Achæans and Hellenes. Their unimpaired fighting strength was irresistible as soon as it was organized into the Macedonian phalanx, whether directed against their degenerate brother Greeks or against the Persians, whose original Nordic elements had also by this time practically disappeared. When in its turn the pure Macedonian blood was impaired by intermixture with Asiatics, they, too, vanished and even the royal Macedonian dynasties in Asia and Egypt soon ceased to be Nordic or Greek except in language and customs.
It is interesting to note that the Greek states in which the Nordic element most predominated outlived the other states. Athens fell before Sparta and Thebes outlived them both. Macedon in classic times was considered quite the most barbarous state in Hellas and was scarcely recognized as forming part of Greece, but it was through the military power of its armies and the genius of Alexander that the Levant and western Asia became Hellenized. Alexander with his Nordic features, aquiline nose, fair skin, gently curling light hair and mixed eyes, the left blue and the right very black, typifies this Nordic conquest of the Near East.
It is scarcely possible to-day to find in purity the physical traits of the ancient race in the Greek-speaking lands and islands and it is chiefly among the pure Nordics of Anglo-Norman type that there occur those smooth and regular classic features, especially the brow and nose lines, that were the delight of the sculptors of Hellas.
To what extent any of the blood of the ancient Hellenes flows in the veins of the Greeks of to-day is difficult to determine but it should be found, if anywhere, in Crete and in the Ægean Islands. The modern Greek is trying to purify his language back to classic Ionian and to appropriate the traditions of the mighty Past, but to do this something more is needed than the naming of children after Agamemnon and Hecuba. Even in Roman times, the ancient Greek of the classic period was little more than a tradition and the term Græculus given to the contemporary Hellenes was one of contempt.
Concerning the physical type of classic in contrast to Homeric Greece, we know that the Greeks were predominantly long-headed and of relatively short stature in comparison with the northern barbarians. The modern Greeks are also relatively short in stature, but are moderately round-headed. As to color these modern Greeks are substantially all dark as to eye and hair, with a somewhat swarthy skin.
Among Albanians and such Greeks as show blond traits light eyes are more than ten times as numerous as light hair. The Albanians are members of the tall, round-headed Dinaric race and have distant relationship with the Nordics. They may possibly represent an ancient cross between Nordics and Alpines and they constitute to-day a marked subdivision of the latter. They resemble the Round Barrow brachycephs who entered Britain just before or at the opening of the Bronze Age and who are still scantily represented among the living English and Welsh. This type called the Beaker Maker or Borreby type is characterized by a moderately round head and great stature, strength and considerable intellectual force. The Albanian or Dinaric type was not, so far as we know, represented in ancient Greece although some modern archæologists have suggested that the Spartans were of this type. We have as yet no evidence of the color, size and skull shape of the Spartans, but we do know that their Dorian ancestors claimed to have come from or through the mountains of northern Epirus (Albania). The Dorian dialects are also said to be more closely related to modern Albanian—which is derived from the ancient Illyrian—than are the Ionian dialects. The Spartan character, if that be any test of race, was heavy, slow and steady, and would indicate northern rather than Mediterranean antecedents.
Concerning modern Europe north of the Alps, culture came from the south and not from the east and to the Mediterranean subspecies is due the foundation of our civilization. The ancient Mediterranean world was for the most part of this race; the long-sustained civilization of Egypt, which endured for thousands of years in almost uninterrupted sequence; the brilliant Minoan Empire of Crete, which flourished between 3000 and 1200 B. C. and was the ancestor of the Mycenæan cultures of Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Sardinia; the mysterious Empire of Etruria, the predecessor and teacher of Rome; the Hellenic states and colonies throughout the Mediterranean and Black Seas; the maritime and mercantile power of Phœnicia and its mighty colony, imperial Carthage; all were the creation of this race. The sea empire of Crete, when its royal palace at Cnossos was burned by the ‘sea peoples’ of the north, passed to Tyre, Sidon and Carthage and from them to the Greeks. The early development of the art of navigation is to be attributed to this race and from them the North centuries later learned its maritime architecture.
Even though the Mediterranean race has no claim to the invention of the synthetic languages and though it played a relatively small part in the development of the civilization of the Middle Ages or of modern times, nevertheless to it belongs the chief credit of the classic civilization of Europe in the sciences, art, poetry, literature and philosophy, as well as the major part of the civilization of Greece and a very large share in the Empire of Rome.
In the Eastern Empire the Mediterraneans were the predominant factor under the guise of Byzantine Greeks. Owing to the fact that our histories have been written under the influence of Roman orthodoxy and because in the eyes of the Frankish Crusaders the Byzantine Greeks were heretics, they have been regarded by us as degenerate cowards.
But throughout the Middle Ages Byzantium represented in unbroken sequence the Empire of Rome in the East and as the capital of that Empire it held Mohammedan Asia in check for nearly a thousand years. When at last in 1453 the imperial city deserted by western Christendom was stormed by the Ottoman Turks and Constantine, last of Roman Emperors, fell sword in hand there was enacted one of the greatest tragedies of all time.
With the fall of Constantinople the Empire of Rome passes finally from the scene of history and the development of civilization is transferred from Mediterranean lands and from the Mediterranean race to the North Sea and to the Nordic race.
VI — The Nordic Race
We have shown that the Mediterranean race entered Europe from the south and forms part of a great group of peoples extending into southern Asia, that the Alpine race came from the east through Asia Minor and the valley of the Danube and that its present European distribution is merely the westernmost point of an ethnic pyramid, the base of which rests solidly on the round skulled peoples of the great plateaux of central Asia. Both of these races are, therefore, western extensions of Asiatic subspecies and neither of them can be considered as exclusively European.
With the remaining race, the Nordic, however, the case is different. This is a purely European type, in the sense that it has developed its physical characters and its civilization within the confines of that continent. It is, therefore, the Homo europæus, the white man par excellence. It is everywhere characterized by certain unique specializations, namely, wavy brown or blond hair and blue, gray or light brown eyes, fair skin, high, narrow and straight nose, which are associated with great stature and a long skull, as well as with abundant head and body hair.
A composite picture of this Nordic race and remarkable examples of its best contemporary types can be found in the English illustrated weeklies, which are publishing during this great war the lists and portraits of their officers who have fallen in battle. No nation, not even England although richly endowed with a Nordic gentry, can stand the loss of so much good blood. Here is the evidence, if such be needed, of the actual Passing of the Great Race.
Abundance of hair is an ancient and generalized character which the Nordics share with the Alpines of both Europe and Asia, but the light colored eyes and light colored hair are characters of relatively recent specialization and consequently highly unstable.
The pure Nordic race is at present clustered around the shores of the Baltic and North Seas from which it has spread west and south and east fading off gradually into the two preceding races.
The centre of its greatest purity is now in Sweden and there is no doubt that at first the Scandinavian Peninsula and later, also, the immediately adjoining shores of the Baltic were the centres of radiation of the Teutonic or Scandinavian branch of this race.
The population of Scandinavia has been composed of this Nordic subspecies from the commencement of Neolithic times and Sweden to-day represents one of the few countries which has never been overwhelmed by foreign conquest and in which there has been but a single racial type from the beginning. This nation is unique in its unity of race, language, religion and social ideals.
Southern Scandinavia only became fit for human habitation on the retreat of the glaciers about twelve thousand years ago and apparently was immediately occupied by the Nordic race. This is one of the few geological dates which is absolute and not relative. It rests on a most interesting series of computations made by Baron DeGeer, based on an actual count of the laminated deposits of clay laid down annually by the retreating glaciers, each layer representing the summer deposit of the subglacial stream.
The Nordics first appear at the close of the Paleolithic along the coasts of the Baltic. The earliest industry discovered in this region, named the Maglemose and found in Denmark and elsewhere around the Baltic, is probably the culture of the Proto-Teutonic branch of the Nordic race. No human remains in connection therewith have been found.
The vigor and power of the Nordic race as a whole is such that it could not have been evolved in so restricted an area as southern Sweden although its Teutonic or Scandinavian section did develop there in comparative isolation. The Nordics must have had a larger field for their specialization and a longer period for their evolution than is afforded by the limited time which has elapsed since Sweden became habitable. For the development of so marked a type there is required a continental area isolated and protected for long ages from the intrusion of other races. The climatic conditions must have been such as to impose a rigid elimination of defectives through the agency of hard winters and the necessity of industry and foresight in providing the year’s food, clothing and shelter during the short summer. Such demands on energy if long continued would produce a strong, virile and self-contained race which would inevitably overwhelm in battle nations whose weaker elements had not been purged by the conditions of an equally severe environment.
An area conforming to these requirements is offered by the forests and plains of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia. It was here that the Proto-Nordic type evolved and here their remnants are found. They were protected from Asia on the east by the then almost continuous water connections across eastern Russia between the White Sea and the old Caspian-Aral Sea.
During the last glacial advance (known as the Würm) which, like the preceding glaciations, is believed to have been a period of land depression, the White Sea extended far to the south of its present limits, while the enlarged Caspian Sea, then and long afterward connected with the Sea of Aral, extended northward to the great bend of the Volga. The intermediate area was studded with large lakes and morasses. Thus an almost complete water barrier of shallow sea located just west of the low Ural Mountains, separated Europe from Asia during the Würm glaciation and the following period of glacial retreat. The broken connection was restored just before the dawn of history by a slight elevation of the land and the shrinking of the Caspian-Aral Sea through the increasing desiccation which has left its present surface below sea level.
An important element in the maintenance of the isolation of this Nordic cradle on the south is the fact that from earliest times down to this day the pressure of population has been unchangeably from the bleak and sterile north, southward and eastward, into the sunny but enervating lands of France, Italy, Greece, Persia and India.
In these forests and steppes of the north, the Nordic race gradually evolved in isolation and at an early date spread north over the Scandinavian Peninsula together with much of the land now submerged under the Baltic and North Seas.
Nordic strains form everywhere a substratum of population throughout Russia and underlie the round skulled Slavs who first appear a little over a thousand years ago as coming not from the direction of Asia but from south Poland. Burial mounds called kurgans are widely scattered throughout Russia from the Carpathians to the Urals and contain numerous remains of a dolichocephalic race,—in fact, more than three-fourths of the skulls are of this type. Round skulls first become numerous in ancient Russian graveyards about 900 A. D. and soon increase to such an extent that in the Slavic period from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries one-half of the skulls were brachycephalic, while in modern cemeteries the proportion of round skulls is still greater. The ancient Nordic element, however, still forms a very considerable portion of the population of northern Russia and contributes the blondness and the red-headedness so characteristic of the Russian of to-day. As we leave the Baltic coasts the Nordic characters fade out both toward the south and east. The blond element in the nobility of Russia is of later Scandinavian and Teutonic origin.
When the seas which separated Russia from Asia dried, when the isolation and exacting climate of the north had done their work and produced the vigorous Nordic type, and when in the fulness of time bronze for their weapons reached them these men burst upon the southern races, conquering east, south and west. They brought with them from the north the hardihood and vigor acquired under the rigorous selection of a long winter season and vanquished in battle the inhabitants of older and feebler civilizations, but only to succumb in their turn to the softening influences of a life of ease and plenty in their new homes.
The earliest recorded appearance of Aryan-speaking Nordics is our first dim vision of the Sacæ introducing Sanskrit into India, the Cimmerians pouring through the passes of the Caucasus from the grasslands of South Russia to invade the Empire of the Medes and the Achæans and Phrygians conquering Greece and the Ægean coast of Asia Minor. About 1100 B. C. Nordics enter Italy as Umbrians and Oscans and soon after other Nordics cross the Rhine into Gaul. The latter were the western vanguard of the Celtic-speaking tribes which had long occupied those districts in Germany which lay south and west of the Teutonic Nordics. These Teutons at this early date were confined probably to Scandinavia and the immediate shores of the Baltic and were just beginning to press southward.
This first Celtic wave of Nordics seems to have swept westward along the sandy plains of northern Europe, and entered France through the Low Countries. From this point as Goidels they spread north into Britain, reaching there about 800 B. C. As Gauls they conquered all France and pushed on southward and westward into Spain and over the Maritime Alps into northern Italy, where they encountered the kindred Nordic Umbrians, who at an earlier date had crossed the Alps from the northeast. Other Celtic-speaking Nordics apparently migrated up the Rhine and down the Danube and by the time the Romans came on the scene the Alpines of central Europe had been thoroughly Celticized. These tribes pushed eastward into southern Russia and reached the Crimea as early as the fourth century B. C. Mixed with the natives, they were called by the Greeks the Celto-Scyths. This swarming out of what is now called Germany of the first Nordics was during the closing phases of the Bronze Period and was contemporary with and probably caused by the first great expansion of the Teutons from Scandinavia by way both of Denmark and the Baltic coasts.
These invaders were succeeded by a second wave of Celtic-speaking peoples, the Cymry or Brythons, who drove their Goidelic predecessors still farther westward and exterminated and absorbed them over large areas. These Cymric invasions occurred about 300–100 B. C. and were probably the result of the growing development of the Teutons and their final expulsion of the Celtic-speaking tribes from Germany. These Cymry occupied northern France under the name of Belgæ and invaded England as Brythons in several waves, the last being the true Belgæ. The conquests of these Cymric tribes in both Gaul and Britain were only checked by the legions of Rome.
These migrations are exceedingly hard to trace because of the confusion caused by the fact that Celtic speech is now found on the lips of populations in nowise related to the Nordics who first introduced it. But one fact stands out clearly, all the original Celtic-speaking tribes were Nordic.
What were the special physical characters of these tribes in which they differed from their Teutonic successors is now impossible to say, beyond the possible suggestion that in the British Isles the Scottish and Irish populations in which red hair and gray or green eyes are abundant have rather more of this Celtic strain in them than have the flaxen haired Teutons, whose china-blue eyes are clearly not Celtic.
When the peoples called Gauls or Celts by the Romans and Galatians by the Greeks first appear in history they are described in exactly the same terms as were later the Teutons. They were all gigantic barbarians with fair and very often red hair, then more frequent than to-day, with gray or fiercely blue eyes and were thus clearly members of the Nordic subspecies.
The first Celtic-speaking nations with whom the Romans came in contact were Gaulish and had probably incorporated much Alpine blood by the time they crossed the mountains into the domain of classic history. The Nordic element had become still weaker by absorption from the conquered populations when at a later date the Romans broke through the ring of Celtic nations and came into contact with the Nordic Cymry and Teutons.
After these early expansions of Gauls and Cymry the Teutons appear upon the scene. Of the pure Teutons within the ken of history, it is not necessary to mention more than the most important of the long series of conquering tribes.
The greatest of them all were perhaps the Goths, who came originally from the south of Sweden and were long located on the opposite German coast at the mouth of the Vistula. From here they crossed Poland to the Crimea where they were known in the first century. Three hundred years later they were driven westward by the Huns and forced into the Dacian plain and over the Danube into the Roman Empire. There they split up; the Ostrogoths after a period of subjection to the Huns on the Danube, ravaged the European provinces of the Eastern Empire, conquered Italy and founded there a great but shortlived nation. The Visigoths occupied much of Gaul and then entered Spain driving the Nordic Vandals before them into Africa. The Teutons and Cimbri, destroyed by Marius in southern Gaul about 100 B. C., the Gepidæ, the Alans, the Suevi, the Vandals, the Alemanni of the upper Rhine, the Marcomanni, the Saxons, the Batavians, the Frisians, the Angles, the Jutes, the Lombards and the Heruli of Italy, the Burgundians of the east of France, the Franks of the lower Rhine, the Danes, and, latest of all, the Norse Vikings emerge from the northern forests and seas one after another and sweep through history. Less well known but of great importance are the Varangians, who coming from Sweden in the ninth and tenth centuries, conquered the coast of the Gulf of Finland and much of White Russia and left there a dynasty and aristocracy of Nordic blood. In the tenth and eleventh centuries they were the rulers of Russia.
The traditions of Goths, Vandals, Lombards and Burgundians all point to Sweden as their earliest homeland and probably all the pure Teutonic tribes came originally from Scandinavia and were closely related.
When these Teutonic tribes poured down from the Baltic coasts, their Celtic-speaking Nordic predecessors were already much mixed with the underlying populations, Mediterranean in the west and Alpine in the south. These “Celts” were not recognized by the Teutons as kin in any sense and were all called, Welsh, or foreigners. From this word are derived the names “Wales,” “Cornwales” or “Cornwall,” “Valais,” “Walloons,” and “Vlach” or “Wallachian.”
VII — Teutonic Europe
No proper understanding is possible of the meaning of the history of Christendom or full appreciation of the place in it of the Teutonic Nordics without a brief review of the events in Europe of the last two thousand years.
When Rome fell and changed trade conditions necessitated the transfer of power from its historic capital in Italy to a strategic situation on the Bosporus, western Europe was definitely and finally abandoned to its Teutonic invaders. These same barbarians swept up again and again to the Propontis, only to recoil before the organized strength of the Byzantine Empire and the walls of Mikklegard. The final line of cleavage between the western and eastern Empires corresponded closely to the boundaries of Latin and Greek speech and differences of language no doubt were the chief cause of the political and later of the religious divergence between them.
Until the coming of the Alpine Slavs the Eastern Empire still held in Europe the Balkan Peninsula and much of the eastern Mediterranean. The Western Empire, however, collapsed utterly under the impact of hordes of Nordic Teutons at a much earlier date. In the fourth and fifth centuries of our era north Africa, once the empire of Carthage, had become the seat of the kingdom of Nordic Vandals. Spain fell under the control of the Visigoths and Lusitania, now Portugal, under that of the Suevi. Gaul was Visigothic in the south and Burgundian in the east, while the Frankish kingdom dominated the north until it finally absorbed and incorporated all the territories of ancient Gaul and made it the land of the Franks. Strictly speaking, the northern half of France and the adjoining districts, the country of Langued’oil, is the true land of the Franks while the southern Languedoc was never Frankish except by conquest, and was never as thoroughly Nordicized as the north. Whatever Nordic elements are still to be found there are Gothic and Burgundian but not Frankish.
Italy fell under the control first of the Ostrogoths and then of the Lombards. The purely Nordic Saxons with kindred tribes conquered the British Isles and meanwhile the Norse and Danish Scandinavians contributed a large element to all the coast populations as far south as Spain and the Swedes organized in the eastern Baltic what is now Russia.
Thus when Rome passed all Europe had become superficially Teutonic. At first these Teutons were isolated and independent tribes bearing some shadowy relation to the one organized state they knew, the Empire of Rome. Then came the Mohammedan invasion, which reached western Europe from Africa and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom. The Moslems swept on unchecked until their light horsemen dashed themselves to pieces against the heavy armed cavalry of Charles Martel and his Franks at Tours in 732 A. D.
The destruction of the Vandal kingdom by the armies of the Byzantine Empire, the conquest of Spain by the Moors and finally the overthrow of the Lombards by the Franks were all greatly facilitated by the fact that these barbarians, Vandals, Goths, Suevi and Lombards, with the sole exception of the Franks, were originally Christians of the Arian or Unitarian confession and as such were regarded as heretics by their orthodox Christian subjects. The Franks alone were converted from heathenism directly to the Trinitarian faith to which the old populations of the Roman Empire adhered. From this orthodoxy of the Franks arose the close relation between France, “the eldest daughter of the church,” and the papacy, a connection which lasted for more than a thousand years—in fact nearly to our own day.
With the Goths eliminated western Christendom became Frankish. In the year 800 A. D. Charlemagne was crowned at Rome and re-established the Roman Empire in the west, which included all Christendom outside of the Byzantine Empire. In some form or shape this Roman Empire endured until the beginning of the nineteenth century and during all that time it formed the basis of the political concept of European man.
This same concept lies to-day at the root of the imperial idea. Kaiser, Tsar and Emperor each takes his name and in some way undertakes to trace his title from Cæsar and the Empire. Charlemagne and his successors claimed and often exercised overlordship as to all the other continental Christian nations and when the Crusades began it was the German Emperor who led the Frankish hosts against the Saracens. Charlemagne was a German Emperor, his capital was at Aachen within the present limits of the German Empire and the language of his court was German. For several centuries after the conquest of Gaul by the Franks their Teutonic tongue held its own against the Latin speech of the Romanized Gauls.
The history of all Christian Europe is in some degree interwoven with this Holy Roman Empire. Though the Empire was neither holy nor Roman but altogether secular and Teutonic, it was, nevertheless, the heart of Europe for ages. Holland and Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, Burgundy and Luxemburg, Lombardy and the Veneto, Switzerland and Austria, Bohemia and Styria are states which were originally component parts of the Empire although many of them have since been torn away by rival nations or have become independent, while much of northern Italy remained under the sway of Austria within the memory of living men.
The Empire wasted its strength in imperial ambitions and foreign conquests instead of consolidating, organizing and unifying its own territories and the fact that the imperial crown was elective for many generations before it became hereditary in the House of Hapsburg checked the unification of Germany during the Middle Ages.
A strong hereditary monarchy, such as arose in England and in France, would have anticipated the Germany of to-day by a thousand years and made it the predominant state in Christendom, but disruptive elements in the persons of great territorial dukes were successful throughout its history in preventing an effective concentration of power in the hands of the Emperor.
That the German Emperor was regarded, though vaguely, as the overlord of all Christian monarchs was clearly indicated when Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France appeared as candidates for the imperial crown against Charles of Spain, afterward the Emperor Charles V.
Europe was the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire was Europe predominantly until the Thirty Years’ War. This war was perhaps the greatest catastrophe of all the ghastly crimes committed in the name of religion. It destroyed an entire generation, taking each year for thirty years the finest manhood of the nations.
Two-thirds of the population of Germany was destroyed, in some states such as Bohemia three-fourths of the inhabitants were killed or exiled, while out of 500,000 inhabitants in Würtemberg there were only 48,000 left at the end of the war. Terrible as this loss was, the destruction did not fall equally on the various races and classes in the community. It bore, of course, most heavily upon the big blond fighting man and at the end of the war the German states contained a greatly lessened proportion of Nordic blood. In fact, from that time on the purely Teutonic race in Germany has been largely replaced by the Alpine types in the south and by the Wendish and the Polish types in the east. This change of race in Germany has gone so far that it has been computed that out of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire, only 9,000,000 are purely Teutonic in coloration, stature and skull characters. The rarity of pure Teutonic and Nordic types among the German immigrants to America in contrast to its almost universal prevalence among those from Scandinavia is traceable to the same cause.
In addition, the Thirty Years’ War virtually destroyed the land owning yeomanry and lesser gentry formerly found in mediæval Germany as numerously as in France or in England. The religious wars of France, while not as devasting to the nation as a whole as was the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, nevertheless greatly weakened the French cavalier type, the “petite noblesse de province.” In Germany this class had flourished and throughout the Middle Ages contributed great numbers of knights, poets, thinkers, artists and artisans who gave charm and variety to the society of central Europe. But, as said, this section of the population was practically exterminated in the Thirty Years’ War and this class of gentlemen practically vanishes from German history from that time on.
When the Thirty Years’ War was over there remained in Germany nothing except the brutalized peasantry, largely of Alpine derivation in the south and east, and the high nobility which turned from the toils of endless warfare to mimic on a small scale the court of Versailles. After this long struggle the boundaries in central Europe between the Protestant North and the Catholic South follow in a marked degree the frontier between the northern plain inhabited chiefly by Nordics and the more mountainous countries in the south populated almost entirely by Alpines.
It has taken Germany two centuries to recover her vigor, her wealth and her aspirations to a place in the sun.
During these years Germany was a political nonentity, a mere congeries of petty states bickering and fighting with each other, claiming and owning only the Empire of the Air as Napoleon happily phrased it. Meantime France and England founded their colonial empires beyond the seas.
When in the last generation Germany became unified and organized, she found herself not only too late to share in these colonial enterprises, but also lacking in much of the racial element and still more lacking in the very classes which were her greatest strength and glory before the Thirty Years’ War. To-day the ghastly rarity in the German armies of chivalry and generosity toward women and of knightly protection and courtesy toward the prisoners or wounded can be largely attributed to this annihilation of the gentle classes. The Germans of to-day, whether they live on the farms or in the cities, are for the most part descendants of the peasants who survived, not of the brilliant knights and sturdy foot soldiers who fell in that mighty conflict. Knowledge of this great past when Europe was Teutonic and memories of the shadowy grandeur of the Hohenstaufen Emperors, who, generation after generation, led Teutonic armies over the Alps to assert their title to Italian provinces, have played no small part in modern German consciousness.
These traditions and the knowledge that their own religious dissensions swept them from the leadership of the European world lie at the base of the German imperial ideal of to-day and it is for this ideal that the German armies are dying, just as did their ancestors for a thousand years under their Fredericks, Henrys, Conrads and Ottos.
But the Empire of Rome and the Empire of Charlemagne are no more and the Teutonic type is divided almost equally between the contending forces in this world war. With the United States in the field the balance of pure Nordic blood will be heavily against the Central Powers, which pride themselves on being “the Teutonic powers.”
Germany is too late and is limited to a destiny fixed and ordained for her on the fatal day in 1618 when the Hapsburg Ferdinand forced the Protestants of Bohemia into revolt.
Although as a result of the Thirty Years’ War the German Empire is far less Nordic than in the Middle Ages, the north and northwest of Germany are still Teutonic throughout and in the east and south the Alpines have been thoroughly Germanized with an aristocracy and upper class very largely of pure Teutonic blood.
VIII — The Expansion of the Nordics
The men of Nordic blood to-day form practically all the population of Scandinavian countries, as also a majority of the population of the British Isles and are almost pure in type in Scotland and eastern and northern England. The Nordic realm includes nearly all the northern third of France with extensions into the fertile southwest; all the rich lowlands of Flanders; all Holland; the northern half of Germany with extensions up the Rhine and down the Danube; and the north of Poland and of Russia. Recent calculations indicate that there are about 90,000,000 of purely Nordic physical type in Europe out of a total population of 420,000,000.
Throughout southern Europe a Nordic nobility of Teutonic type everywhere forms the old aristocratic and military classes or what now remains of them. These aristocrats, by as much as their blood is pure, are taller and blonder than the native populations, whether these be Alpine in central Europe or Mediterranean in Spain or in the south of France and Italy.
The countries speaking Low German dialects are almost purely Nordic but the populations of High German speech are very largely Teutonized Alpines and occupy lands once Celtic-speaking. The main distinction between the two dialects is the presence of a large number of Celtic elements in High German.
In northern Italy there is a large amount of Nordic blood. In Lombardy, Venice and elsewhere throughout the country the aristocracy is blonder and taller than the peasantry, but the Nordic element in Italy has declined noticeably since the Middle Ages. From Roman times onward for a thousand years the Teutons swarmed into northern Italy, through the Alps and chiefly by way of the Brenner Pass. With the stoppage of these Nordic reinforcements this strain seems to have grown less all through Italy.3
In the Balkan Peninsula there is little to show for the floods of Nordic blood that have poured in for the last 3,500 years, beginning with the Achæans of Homer, who first appeared en masse about 1400 B. C. and were followed successively by the Dorians, Cimmerians and Gauls, down to the Goths and the Varangians of Byzantine times.
The tall stature of the population along the Illyrian Alps from the Tyrol to Albania on the south is undoubtedly of Nordic origin and dates from some of these early invasions, but these Illyrians have been so crossed with Slavs that all other blond elements have been lost and the existing population is essentially of brachycephalic Alpine type. They are known as the Dinaric race. What few remnants of blondness occur in this district, more particularly in Albania, as well as the so-called Frankish elements in Bosnia, may probably be attributed to later infiltrations.
The Tyrolese seem to be largely Nordic except in respect to their round skull.
In Russia and in Poland the Nordic stature, blondness and long skull grow less and less pronounced as one proceeds south and east from the Gulf of Finland.
It would appear that in all those parts of Europe outside of its natural habitat, the Nordic blood is on the wane from England to Italy and that the ancient, acclimated and primitive populations of Alpine and Mediterranean race are subtly reasserting their long lost political power through a high breeding rate and democratic institutions.
In western Europe the first wave of the Nordic tribes appeared about three thousand years ago and was followed by other invasions with the Nordic element becoming stronger until after the fall of Rome whole tribes moved into its provinces, Teutonizing them more or less for varying lengths of time.
These incoming Nordics intermarried with the native populations and were gradually bred out and the resurgence of the old native stock, chiefly Alpine, has proceeded steadily since the Frankish Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard kingdom and is proceeding with unabated vigor to-day. This process was greatly accelerated in western Europe by the Crusades, which were extremely destructive to the Nordic feudal lords, especially the Frankish and Norman nobility and was continued by the wars of the Reformation and by those of the Revolution. The world war now in full swing with its toll of millions will leave Europe much poorer in Nordic blood. One of its most certain results will be the partial destruction of the aristocratic classes everywhere in northern Europe. In England the nobility has already suffered in battle more than in any century since the Wars of the Roses. This will tend to realize the standardization of type so dear to democratic ideals. If equality cannot be obtained by lengthening and uplifting the stunted of body and of mind, it can be at least realized by the destruction of the exalted of stature and of soul. The bed of Procrustes operates with the same fatal exactness when it shortens the long as when it stretches the undersized.
The first Nordics in Spain were the Gauls who crossed the western Pyrenees about the end of the sixth century before our era and introduced Aryan speech into the Iberian Peninsula. They quickly mixed with Mediterranean natives and the composite Spaniards were called Celtiberians by the Romans.
In Portugal and Spain there are in the physical structure of the population few traces of these early Celtic-speaking Nordic invaders but the Suevi, who a thousand years later occupied parts of Portugal, and the Vandals and Visigoths, who conquered and held Spain for 300 years, have left some small evidence of their blood. In the provinces of northern Spain a considerable percentage of light colored eyes reveals these Nordic elements in the population.
Deep seated Castilian traditions associate aristocracy with blondness and the sangre azul, or blue blood of Spain, probably refers to the blue eye of the Goth, whose traditional claim to lordship is also shown in the Spanish name for gentleman, “hidalgo,” said to mean “the son of the Goth.” The fact that the blood shows as “blue” through the fair Nordic skin is also to be taken into account.
As long as this Gothic nobility controlled the Spanish states during the endless crusades against the Moors, Spain belonged to the Nordic kingdoms, but when their blood became impaired by losses in wars waged outside of Spain and in the conquest of the Americas, the sceptre fell from this noble race into the hands of the native Iberian, who had not the physical vigor or the intellectual strength to maintain the world empire built up by the stronger race. For 200 years the Spanish infantry had no equal in Europe but this distinction disappeared with the opening decades of the seventeenth century.
The splendid conquistadores of the New World were of Nordic type, but their pure stock did not long survive their new surroundings and to-day they have vanished utterly, leaving behind them only their language and their religion. After considering well these facts we shall not have to search further for the causes of the collapse of Spain.
Gaul at the time of Cæsar’s conquest was under the rule of the Nordic race, which furnished the bulk of the population of the north as well as the military classes elsewhere and, while the Romans killed off an undue proportion of this fighting element, the power and vigor of the French nation have been based on this blood and its later reinforcements. In fact, in the Europe of to-day the amount of Nordic blood in each nation is a very fair measure of its strength in war and standing in civilization. The proportion of men of pure type of each constituent race to the mixed type is also a powerful factor.
When, about 1000 B. C., the first Nordics crossed the lower Rhine they found the Mediterranean race in France everywhere overwhelmed by an Alpine population except in the south. Long before the time of Cæsar the Celtic language of these invaders had been imposed upon the entire population and the country had been saturated with Nordic blood, except in Aquitaine which seems to have retained until at least that date its Anaryan Iberian speech. These earliest Nordics in the west were known to the ancient world as Gauls. These Gauls, or “Celts,” as they were called by Cæsar, occupied in his day the centre of France. The actual racial complexion of this part of France was overwhelmingly Alpine then and is so now, but this population had been Celticized thoroughly by the Gauls, just as it was Latinized as completely at a later date by the Romans.
The northern third of France, that is above Paris, was inhabited in Cæsar’s time by the Belgæ, a Nordic people of the Cymric division of Celtic speech. They were largely of Teutonic blood and in fact should be regarded as the immediate forerunners of the Germans. They probably represent the early Teutons who had crossed from Sweden and adopted the Celtic speech of their Nordic kindred whom they found on the mainland. These Belgæ had followed the earlier Goidels across Germany into Britain and Gaul and were rapidly displacing their Nordic predecessors, who by this time were much weakened by mixture with the autochthones, when Rome appeared upon the scene and set a limit to their conquests by the Pax Romana.
The Belgæ of the north of France and the Low Countries were the bravest of the peoples of Gaul, according to Cæsar’s oft-quoted remark, but the claim of the modern Belgians to descent from this race is without basis and rests solely on the fact that the present kingdom of Belgium, which only became independent and assumed its proud name in 1831, occupies a small and relatively unimportant corner of the land of the Belgæ. The Flemings of Belgium are Nordic Franks speaking a Low German tongue and the Walloons are Alpines whose language is an archaic French.
The Belgæ and the Goidelic remnants of Nordic blood in the centre of Gaul taken together probably constituted only a small minority in blood of the population, but were everywhere the military and ruling classes. These Nordic elements were later reinforced by powerful Teutonic tribes, namely, Vandals, Visigoths, Alans, Saxons, Burgundians and, most important of all, the Franks of the lower Rhine, who founded modern France and made it for long centuries “la grande nation” of Christendom.
The Frankish dynasties long after Charlemagne were of purely Teutonic blood and the aristocratic land owning and military classes down to the great Revolution were very largely of this type, which by the time of the creation of the Frankish kingdom had incorporated all the other Nordic elements of old Roman Gaul, both Gaulish and Belgic.
The last invasion of Teutonic-speaking barbarians was that of the Danish Northmen, who were, of course, of unmixed Nordic blood and who conquered and settled Normandy in 911 A. D. No sooner had the barbarian invasions ceased than the ancient aboriginal blood strains, Mediterranean, Alpine and elements derived from Paleolithic times, began a slow and steady recovery. Step by step with the reappearance of these primitive and deep rooted stocks the Nordic element in France declined and with it the vigor of the nation. Even in Normandy the Alpines now tend to predominate and the French blonds are becoming more and more limited to the northeastern and eastern provinces.
The chief historic events of the last thousand years have hastened this process and the fact that the Nordic element everywhere forms the fighting section of the community caused the loss in war to fall disproportionately as among the three races in France. The religious wars greatly weakened the Nordic provincial nobility, which was before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew largely Protestant and the extermination of the upper classes was hastened by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. These last wars are said to have shortened the stature of the French by four inches; in other words, the tall Nordic strain was killed off in greater proportions than the little brunet.
When by universal suffrage the transfer of power was completed from a Nordic aristocracy to lower classes predominantly of Alpine and Mediterranean extraction, the decline of France in international power set in. In the country as a whole, the long skulled Mediterraneans are also yielding rapidly to the round skulled Alpines and the average of the cephalic index in France has steadily risen since the Middle Ages and is still rising.
The survivors of the aristocracy, being stripped of political power and to a large extent of wealth, quickly lost their caste pride and committed class suicide by mixing their blood with inferior breeds. One of the most conspicuous features of some of the French nobility of to-day is the strength of Oriental and Mediterranean strains in them. Being for political reasons ardently clerical the nobility welcomes recruits of any racial origin as long as they bring with them money and devotion to the Church.
The loss in war of the best stock through death, wounds or absence from home has been clearly shown in France. The conscripts who were examined for military duty in 1890–2 were those descended in a large measure from the military rejects and other stay-at-homes during the Franco-Prussian War. In Dordogne this contingent showed seven per cent more deficient statures than the normal rate. In some cantons this unfortunate generation was in height an inch below the recruits of preceding years and in it the exemptions for defective physique rose from the normal six per cent to sixteen per cent.
When each generation is decimated or destroyed in turn a race can be injured beyond recovery but it more frequently happens that the result is the annihilation of an entire class, as in the case of the German gentry in the Thirty Years’ War. Desolation of wide districts often resulted from the plagues and famines which followed the armies in old days but deaths from these causes fall most heavily on the weaker part of the population. The loss of valuable breeding stock is far more serious when wars are fought with volunteer armies of picked men than with conscript armies, because in the latter cases the loss is more evenly spread over the whole nation. Before England resorted in the present war to universal conscription the injury to her more desirable and patriotic classes was much more pronounced than in Germany where all types and ranks were called to arms.
In the British Isles we find, before the appearance of the Nordic race, a Mediterranean population and no important element of Alpine blood, so that at the present day we have to deal with only two of the main races instead of all three as in France. In Britain there were, as elsewhere, representatives of earlier races but the preponderant strain of blood was Mediterranean before the first arrival of the Aryan-speaking Nordics.
Ireland was connected with Britain and Britain with the continent until times very recent in a geological sense. The depression of the Channel coasts is progressing rapidly to-day and is known to have been substantial during historic times. The close parallel in blood and culture between England and the opposite coasts of France also indicates a very recent land connection, possibly in early Neolithic times. Men either walked from the continent to England and from England to Ireland, or they paddled across in primitive boats or coracles. The art of ship-building or even archaic navigation cannot go much further back than late Neolithic times.
The Nordic tribes of Celtic speech came to the British Isles in two distinct waves. The earlier invasion of the Goidels, who were still in the Bronze culture, arrived in England about 800 B. C. and in Ireland two centuries later. It was part of the same movement which brought the Gauls into France. The later conquest was by the Cymric-speaking Belgæ who were equipped with iron weapons. It began in the third century B. C. and was still going on in Cæsar’s time. These Cymric Brythons found the early Goidels, with the exception of the aristocracy, much weakened by intermixture with the Mediterranean natives and would probably have destroyed all trace of Goidelic speech in Ireland and Scotland, as they actually did in England, if the Romans had not intervened. The Brythons reached Ireland in small numbers only in the second century B. C.
These Nordic elements in Britain, both Goidelic and Brythonic, were in a minority during Roman times and the ethnic complexion of the island was not much affected by the Roman occupation, as the legions stationed there represented the varied racial stocks of the Empire.
After the Romans abandoned Britain and about 400 A. D., floods of pure Nordics poured into the islands for nearly six centuries, arriving in the north as the Norse pirates, who made Scotland Scandinavian, and in the east as Saxons and Angles, who founded England.
The Angles came from somewhere in central Jutland and the Saxons came from coast lands immediately at the base of the Danish Peninsula. All these districts were then and are now almost purely Teutonic; in fact, this is part of old Saxony and is to-day the core of Teutonic Germany.
These Saxon districts sent out at that time swarms of invaders not only into England but into France and over the Alps into Italy, just as at a much later period the same land sent swarming colonies into Hungary and Russia.
The same Saxon invaders passed down the Channel coasts and traces of their settlement on the mainland remain to this day in the Cotentin district around Cherbourg. Scandinavian sea peoples called Danes or Northmen swarmed over as late as 900 A. D. and conquered all eastern England. This Danish invasion of England was the same that brought the Northmen or Normans into France. In fact the occupation of Normandy was probably by Danes and the conquest of England was largely the work of Norsemen, as Norway at that time was under Danish kings.
Both of these invasions, especially the later, swept around the greater island and inundated Ireland, driving both the Neolithic aborigines and their Celtic-speaking masters into the bogs and islands of the west.
The blond Nordic element to-day is very marked in Ireland as in England. It is derived, to some extent, from the early invaders of Celtic speech, but the Goidelic element has been very largely absorbed in Ireland as in western England and in Scotland by the Iberian substratum of the population and is found to-day rather in the form of Nordic characters in brunets than in the entirely blond individuals who represent later and purer Nordic strains.
The figures for recruits taken some decades ago in the two countries would indicate that the Irish as a whole are considerably lighter in eye and darker in hair color than are the English. The combination of black Iberian hair with blue or gray Nordic eyes is frequently found in Ireland and also in Spain and in both these countries is justly admired for its beauty, but it is by no means an exclusively Irish type.
The tall, blond Irishmen are to-day chiefly Danish with the addition of English, Norman and Scotch elements, which have poured into the lesser island for a thousand years and have imposed the English speech upon it. The more primitive and ancient elements in Ireland have always shown great ability to absorb newcomers and during the Middle Ages it was notorious that the Norman and English colonists quickly sank to the cultural level of the natives.
In spite of the fact that Paleoliths have not been found there some indications of Paleolithic man appear in Ireland both as single characters and as individuals. Being, like Brittany, situated on the extreme western outposts of Eurasia, it has more than its share of generalized and low types surviving in the living populations and these types, the Firbolgs, have imparted a distinct and very undesirable aspect to a large portion of the inhabitants of the west and south and have greatly lowered the intellectual status of the population as a whole. The cross between these elements and the Nordics appears to be a bad one and the mental and cultural traits of the aborigines have proved to be exceedingly persistent and appear especially in the unstable temperament and the lack of coordinating and reasoning power, so often found among the Irish. To the dominance of the Mediterraneans mixed with Pre-Neolithic survivals in the south and west are to be attributed the aloofness of the island from the general trend of European civilization and its long adherence to ancient forms of religion and even to Pre-Christian superstitions.
In England, the same two ethnic elements are present, namely the Nordic and the Mediterranean. There is, especially in Wales and in the west central counties of England, a large substratum of ancient Mediterranean blood but the later Nordic elements are everywhere superimposed upon it.
Scotland is by race Anglian in the Lowlands and Norse in the Highlands with underlying Goidelic and Brythonic elements, which are exceedingly hard to identify. The Mediterranean strain is marked in the Highlands and is frequently associated with tall stature.
This brunetness in Scotland is, of course, derived from the same underlying Mediterranean stock which we have found elsewhere in the British Islands.
The inhabitants of Scotland before the arrival of the Celtic-speaking Nordics seem to have been the Picts, whose language was almost surely Non-Aryan. Judging from the remnants of Anaryan syntax in the Goidelic and to a lesser degree in the Cymric languages, Pictish was related to the Anaryan Berber tongues still spoken in North Africa. No trace of this Pre-Aryan syntax is found in English.
Where one race imposes a new language on another, the change is most marked in the vocabulary while the ancient usage in syntax or the construction of sentences is the more apt to survive and these ancient forms often give us a valuable clew to the aboriginal speech. This same Anaryan syntax is particularly marked in the Irish language, a condition which fits in with the other Pre-Aryan usages and types found there.
This divergence between the new vocabulary and the ancient habits of syntax is probably one of the causes of the extreme splitting up of the various branches of the Aryan mother tongue.
Wales, like western Ireland, is a museum of racial antiquities and being an unattractive and poor country has exported men rather than received immigration, while such invasions as did arrive came with spent force.
The mass of the population of Wales especially in the upland or moorland districts is Mediterranean, with a considerable addition of Paleolithic remnants. With changing social and industrial conditions these Neolithic Mediterraneans are pushing into the valleys or towns with a resultant replacement of the Nordic types.
Recent and intensive investigations reveal everywhere in Wales distinct physical types living side by side or in adjoining villages unchanged and unchangeable throughout the centuries. Extensive blending has not taken place though much crossing has occurred and the persistence of the skull shape has been particularly marked. Such individuals as are of pure Nordic type are generally members of the old county families and land owning class.
As to language in Wales, the Cymric is everywhere spoken in various dialects, but there are indications of the ancient underlying Goidelic. In fact, Brythonic or Cymric may not have reached Wales much before the Roman conquest of Britain. The earlier Goidelic survived in parts of Wales as late as the seventh century but by the eleventh century all consciousness of race and linguistic distinctions had disappeared in the common name of Cymry. This name should perhaps be limited to the Brythons of England and not used for their kindred on the Continent.
In Cornwall and along the Welsh border racial types are often grouped in separate villages and the intellectual and moral distinctions between them are well recognized.
The Nordic species of man in its various branches made Gaul the land of the Franks and made Britain the land of the Angles and the Englishmen who built the British Empire and founded America were of the Nordic and not of the Mediterranean type.
One of the most vigorous Nordic elements in France, England and America was contributed by the Normans and their influence on the development of these countries cannot be ignored. The descendants of the Danish and Norse Vikings who settled in Normandy as Teutonic-speaking heathen and who as Normans crossed over to Saxon England and conquered it in 1066 are among the finest and noblest examples of the Nordic race. Their only rivals in these characters were the early Goths.
This Norman strain, while purely Nordic, seems to have been radically different in its mental makeup, and to some extent in its physical detail from the Saxons of England and also from their kindred in Scandinavia.
The Normans appear to have been “fine race” to use a French idiom and their descendants are often characterized by a tall, slender figure, much less bulky than the typical Teuton, of proud bearing and with clearly marked features of classic Greek regularity. The type is seldom extremely blond and is often dark. These Latinized Vikings were and are animated by a restless and nomadic energy and by a fierce aggressiveness. They played a brilliant role during the twelfth and following centuries but later, on the continent, this strain ran out, though leaving here and there traces of its former presence, notably in Sicily where the grayish blue Sicilian eye called “the Norman eye” is still found among the old noble families.
The Norman type is still very common among the English of good family and especially among hunters, explorers, navigators, adventurers and officers in the British army. These latter-day Normans are natural rulers and administrators and it is to this type that England largely owes her extraordinary ability to govern justly and firmly the lower races. This Norman blood occurs often among the native Americans but with the changing social conditions and the filling up of the waste places of the earth it is doomed to a speedy extinction.
The Normans were Nordics with a dash of brunet blood and their conquest of England strengthened the Nordic and not the Mediterranean elements in the British Isles, but the connection once established with France especially with Aquitaine later introduced from southern France certain brunet elements of Mediterranean affinities.
The upper class Normans on their arrival in England were probably purely Scandinavian, but in the lower classes there were some dark strains. They brought with them large numbers of ecclesiastics who were, for the most part drawn from the more ancient types throughout France. Careful investigation of the graveyards and vaults in which these churchmen were buried revealed a large percentage of round skulls among them.
In both Normandy and in the lowlands of Scotland there was much the same mixture of blood between Scandinavian and Saxon but with a smaller amount of Saxon blood in France. The result in both cases was the production of an extraordinarily forceful race.
The Nordics in England are in these days apparently receding before the Neolithic Mediterranean type. The causes of this decline are the same as in France and the chief loss is through the wastage of blood by war and through emigration.
The typical British soldier is blond or red bearded and the typical sailor is always a blond. The migrating type from England is also chiefly Nordic. These facts would indicate that nomadism as well as love of war and adventure are Nordic characteristics.
An extremely potent influence, however, is the transformation of the nation from an agricultural to a manufacturing community. Heavy, healthful work in the fields of northern Europe enables the Nordic type to thrive, but the cramped factory and crowded city quickly weed him out, while the little brunet Mediterranean can work a spindle, set type, sell ribbons or push a clerk’s pen far better than the big, clumsy and somewhat heavy Nordic blond, who needs exercise, meat and air and cannot live under Ghetto conditions.
The increase of urban communities at the expense of the countryside is also an important element in the fading of the Nordic type, because the energetic countryman of this blood is more apt to improve his fortunes by moving to the city than the less ambitious Mediterranean.
The country villages and the farms are the nurseries of nations, while cities are consumers and seldom producers of men. The effort now being made in America to settle undesirable immigrants on farms may, from the viewpoint of race replacement, be more dangerous than allowing them to remain in crowded Ghettos or tenements.
If England has deteriorated and there are those who think they see indications of such decline, it is due to the lowering proportion of the Nordic blood and the transfer of political power from the vigorous Nordic aristocracy and middle classes to the radical and labor elements, both largely recruited from the Mediterranean type.
Only in Scandinavia and northwestern Germany does the Nordic race seem to maintain its full vigor in spite of the enormous wastage of three thousand years of the swarming forth of its best fighting men. Norway, however, after the Viking outburst has never exhibited military power and Sweden, in the centuries between the Varangian period and the rise of Gustavus Adolphus, did not enjoy a reputation for fighting efficiency. All the three Scandinavian countries after vigorously attacking Christendom a thousand years ago disappear from history as a nursery for soldiers until the Reformation when Sweden suddenly reappears just in time to save Protestantism on the Continent. To-day all three seem to be intellectually anæmic.
Upper and Lower Austria, the Tyrol and Styria have a very considerable Nordic element which is in political control but the Alpine races are slowly replacing the Nordics both there and in Hungary.
Holland and Flanders are purely Teutonic, the Flemings being the descendants of those Franks who did not adopt Latin speech as did their Teutonic kin across the border in Artois and Picardy; and Holland is the ancient Batavia with the Frisian coast lands eastward to old Saxony.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden are purely Nordic and yearly contribute swarms of a splendid type of immigrants to America and are now, as they have been for thousands of years, the chief nursery and broodland of the master race.
In southwestern Norway and in Denmark, there is a substantial number of short, dark round heads of Alpine affinities. These dark Norwegians are regarded as somewhat inferior socially by their Nordic countrymen. Perhaps as a result of this disability, a disproportionately large number of Norwegian immigrants to America are of this type. Apparently America is doomed to receive in these later days the least desirable classes and types from each European nation now exporting men.
In mediæval times the Norse and Danish Vikings sailed not only the waters of the known Atlantic, but ventured westward through the fogs and frozen seas to Iceland, Greenland and America.
Sweden, after sending forth her Goths and other early Teutonic tribes, turned her attention to the shores of the eastern Baltic, colonized the coast of Finland and the Baltic provinces and supplied also a strong Scandinavian element to the aristocracy of Russia.
The coast of Finland is as a result Swedish and the natives of the interior have distinctly Nordic characters with the exception of the skull, which in its roundness shows an Alpine cross.
The population of the so-called Baltic provinces of Russia is everywhere Nordic and their affinities are with Scandinavia and Germany rather than with Slavic Moscovy. The most primitive Aryan languages, namely, Lettish, Lithuanian and the recently extinct Old Prussian, are found in this neighborhood and here we are not far from the original Nordic homeland.
IX — The Nordic Fatherland
The area in Europe where the Nordic race developed and in which the Aryan languages originated probably included the forest region of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia, together with the grasslands which stretched from the Ukraine eastward into the steppes south of the Ural. From causes already mentioned this area was long isolated from the rest of the world and especially from Asia. When the unity of the Aryan race and of the Aryan language was broken up at the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, wave after wave of the early Nordics pushed westward along the sandy plains of the north and pressed against and through the Alpine populations of central Europe. Usually these early Nordics, as indeed many of the later ones, constituted only a thin layer of ruling classes and there must have been many countries conquered by them in which we have no historic evidence of their existence, linguistic or otherwise. This must have certainly been the case in those numerous instances where only the leaders were Nordics and the great mass of their followers slaves or serfs of inferior races.
The Nordics also swept down through Thrace into Greece and Asia Minor, while other large and important groups entered Asia partly through the Caucasus Mountains, but in greater strength they migrated around the northern and eastern sides of the Caspian-Aral Sea.
That portion of the Nordic race which continued to inhabit south Russia and grazed their flocks of sheep and herds of horses on the grasslands were the Scythians of the Greeks and from these nomad shepherds came the Cimmerians, Persians, Sacæ, Massagetæ and perhaps the leaders of the Kassites, Mitanni and other early Aryan-speaking Nordic invaders of Asia. The descendants of these Nordics are scattered throughout Russia but are now submerged by the later Slavs.
Well marked characters of the Nordic race, which were established in Neolithic times if not earlier, enable us to distinguish it definitely wherever it appears in history and we know that all the blondness in the world is derived from this source. As blondness is easily observed and recorded we are apt to lay too much emphasis on this single character. The brown shades of hair are equally Nordic.
When the Nordics first enter the Mediterranean world their arrival is everywhere marked by a new and higher civilization. In most cases the contact of the vigorous barbarians with the ancient civilizations created a sudden impulse of life and an outburst of culture as soon as the first destruction wrought by the conquest was repaired.
In addition to the long continued selection exercised by severe climatic conditions and the consequent elimination of ineffectives, both of which affects a race, there is another force at work which concerns the individual as well. The energy developed in the north is not lost immediately when transferred to the softer conditions of existence in the Mediterranean and Indian countries. This energy endures for several generations and only dies away slowly as the northern blood becomes diluted and the impulse to strive fades.
The contact of Hellene and Pelasgian caused the blossoming of the ancient civilization of Hellas, just as two thousand years later when the Nordic invaders of Italy had absorbed the science, art and literature of Rome, they produced that splendid century we call the Renaissance.
The chief men of the Cinque Cento and the preceding century were of Nordic blood, largely Gothic and Lombard, which is recognized easily by a close inspection of busts or portraits in northern Italy. Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci were all of Nordic type, just as in classic times many of the chief men and of the upper classes were Nordic.
Similar expansions of civilization and organization of empire followed the incursion of the Nordic Persians into the land of the round skulled Medes and the introduction of Sanskrit into India by the Nordic Sacæ who conquered that peninsula. These outbursts of progress due to the first contact and mixture of two contrasted races are, however, only transitory and pass with the last lingering trace of Nordic blood.
In India the blood of these Aryan-speaking invaders has been absorbed by the dark Hindu and in the final event only their synthetic speech survives.
The marvellous organization of the Roman state made use of the services of Nordic mercenaries and kept the Western Empire alive for three centuries after the ancient Roman stock had virtually ceased to exist.
The date when the population of the Empire had become predominantly of Mediterranean and Oriental blood, due to the introduction of slaves from the east and the wastage of Italian blood in war, coincides with the establishment of the Empire under Augustus and the last Republican patriots represent the final protest of the old patrician Nordic strain. For the most part they refused to abdicate their right to rule in favor of manumitted slaves and imperial favorites and they fell in battle and sword in hand. The Romans died out but the slaves survived and their descendants form the great majority of the south Italians of to-day.
In the last days of the Republic, Cæsar was the leader of the mob, the Plebs, which by that time had ceased to be of Roman blood. Pompey’s party represented the remnants of the old native Roman aristocracy and was defeated at Pharsalia not by Cæsar’s plebeian clients but by his Nordic legionaries from Gaul. Cassius and Brutus were the last successors of Pompey and their overthrow at Philippi was the final death blow to the Republican party; with them the native Roman families disappear almost entirely.
The decline of the Romans and for that matter of the native Italians began with the Punic Wars when in addition to the Romans who fell in battle a large portion of the country population of Italy was destroyed by Hannibal. Native Romans suffered greatly in the Social and Servile Wars as well as in the civil conflicts between the factions of Sylla, who led the Patricians, and Marius who represented the Plebs. Bloody proscriptions of the rival parties followed alternately the victory of one side and then of the other and under the tyranny of the Emperors of the first century also the old Roman stock was the greatest sufferer until it practically vanished from the scene.
Voluntary childlessness was the most potent cause of the decline under the Empire and when we read of the abject servility of bearers of proud names in the days of Nero and Caligula, we must remember that they could not rally to their standard followers among the Plebs. They had only the choice of submission or suicide and many chose the latter alternative. The abjectness of the Roman spirit under the Empire is thus to be explained by a change in race.
With the expanding dominion of Rome the native elements of vigor were drawn year after year into the legions and spent their active years in wars or in garrisons, while the slaves and those unfit for military duty stayed home and bred. In the present great war while the native Americans are at the front fighting the aliens and immigrants are allowed to increase without check and the parallel is a close one.
Slaves began to be imported into Italy in numbers in the second century B. C. to work the large plantations—latifundia—of the wealthy Romans. This importation of slaves and the ultimate extension of the Roman citizenship to their manumitted descendants and to inferior races throughout the growing Empire and the losses in internal and foreign wars, ruined the state. In America we find another close parallel in the Civil War and the subsequent granting of citizenship to Negroes and to ever increasing numbers of immigrants of plebeian, servile or Oriental races, who throughout history have shown little capacity to create, organize or even to comprehend Republican institutions.
In Rome, when this change in blood was substantially complete, the state could no longer be operated under Republican forms of government and the Empire arose to take its place. At the beginning the Empire was clothed in the garb of republicanism in deference to such Roman elements as still persisted in the Senate and among the Patricians but ultimately these external forms were discarded and the state became virtually a pure despotism.
The new population understood little and cared less for the institutions of the ancient Republic but they were jealous of their own rights of “Bread and the Circus”—“panem et circenses”—and there began to appear in place of the old Roman religion the mystic rites of Eastern countries so welcome to the plebeian and uneducated soul. The Emperors to please the vulgar erected from time to time new shrines to strange gods utterly unknown to the Romans of the early Republic. In America, also, strange temples, which would have been abhorrent to our Colonial ancestors, are multiplying and our streets and parks are turned over to monuments to foreign “patriots,” designed not to please the artistic sense of the passer-by but to gratify the national preference of some alien element in the electorate.
These comments on the change of race in Rome at the beginning of our era are not mere speculation. An examination of many thousands of Roman columbaria or funeral urns and the names inscribed thereon show quite clearly that as early as the first century of our era eighty to ninety per cent of the urban population of the Roman Empire was of servile extraction and that about seven-eighths of this slave population was drawn from districts within the boundaries of the Empire and very largely from the countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean. Few names are found which indicate that their bearers came from Gaul or the countries beyond the Alps. These Nordic barbarians were of more use in the legions than as household servants.
At the beginning of the Christian era the entire Levant and countries adjoining it in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt had been so thoroughly hellenized that many of their inhabitants bore Greek names. It was from these countries and from northern Africa that the slave population of Rome was drawn. Their descendants were the most important element in the Roman melting pot and even to-day form the predominant element in the population of Italy south of the Apennines. When the Nordic barbarians a few centuries later poured in, these Romanized Orientals disappeared temporarily from view under the rule of the vigorous northerners but they have steadily absorbed the latter until the Nordic elements in Italy now are to be found chiefly in the Lombard plains and the region of the Alps.
The Byzantine Empire from much the same causes as the Roman became in its turn gradually less and less European and more and more Oriental until it, too, withered and expired.
Regarded in the light of the facts the fall of Rome ceases to be a mystery. The wonder is that the State lived on after the Romans were extinct and that the Eastern Empire survived so long with an ever fading Greek population. In Rome and in Greece only the language of the dominant race survived.
So entirely had the blood of the Romans vanished in the last days of the Empire that sorry bands of barbarians wandered at will through the desolated provinces. Cæsar and his legions would have made short work of these unorganized banditti but Cæsar’s legions were a memory, though one great enough to inspire in the intruders somewhat of awe and desire to imitate. Against invaders, however, brains and brawn are more effective than tradition and culture, however noble these last may be.
Early ascetic Christianity played a large part in this decline of the Roman Empire as it was at the outset the religion of the slave, the meek and the lowly while Stoicism was the religion of the strong men of the time. This bias in favor of the weaker elements greatly interfered with their elimination by natural processes and the fighting force of the Empire was gradually undermined. Christianity was in sharp contrast to the worship of tribal deities which preceded it and it tended then as now to break down class and race distinctions.
The maintenance of such distinctions is absolutely essential to race purity in any community when two or more races live side by side.
Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type. The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. Races must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort or they ultimately amalgamate and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails.
X — The Nordic Race Outside of Europe
We find few traces of Nordic characters outside of Europe. When Egypt was invaded by the Libyans from the west in 1230 B. C. they were accompanied by “sea peoples,” probably the Achæan Greeks. There is some evidence of blondness among the people of the south shore of the Mediterranean down to Greek times and the Tamahu or fair Libyans are constantly mentioned in Egyptian records. The reddish blond or partly blond Berbers found to-day on the northern slopes of the Atlas Mountains may well be their descendants. That this blondness of the Berbers, though small in amount, is of Nordic origin we may with safety assume, but through what channels it came we have no means of knowing. There is no historic invasion of north Africa by Nordics except the Vandal conquests but there seems to be little probability that this small Teutonic tribe left behind any physical trace in the native population.
There seem to have been traces of Nordic blood among the Philistines and still more among the Amorites. Certain references to the size of the sons of Anak and to the fairness of David, whose mother was an Amoritish woman, point vaguely in this direction.
References in Chinese annals to the green eyes of the Wu-suns or to the Hiung-Nu in central Asia are almost the only evidence we have of the Nordic race in contact with the peoples of eastern Asia, though there are statements in ancient Chinese or Mongolian records as to the existence of blond and tall tribes and nations in those parts of northern Asia where Mongols are now found exclusively. We may expect to acquire much new light on this subject during the next few decades.
The so-called blondness of the hairy Ainus of the northern islands of Japan seems to be due to a trace of what might be called Proto-Nordic blood. In hairiness these people are in sharp contrast with their Mongoloid neighbors but this is a generalized character common to the highest and the lowest races of man. The primitive Australoids and the highly specialized Scandinavians are among the most hairy populations in the world. So in the Ainus this somatological peculiarity is merely the retention of a primitive trait. The occasional brown or greenish eye and the sometimes fair complexion of the Ainus are, however, suggestive of Nordic affinities and of an extreme easterly extension of Proto-Nordics at a very early period.
The skull shape of the Ainus is dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic, while the broad cheek bones indicate a Mongolian cross as among the Esquimaux. The Ainus, like many other small, mysterious peoples, are probably merely the remnants of one of the early races that are fast fading into extinction. The division of man into species and subspecies is very ancient and the chief races of the earth are the successful survivors of a long and fierce competition. Many species, subspecies and races have vanished utterly, except for reversional characters occasionally found in the larger races.
The only Nordics in Asia Minor, so far as we know, were the Phrygians who crossed the Hellespont about 1400 B. C. as part of the same migration which brought the Achæans into Greece, the Cimmerians who entered by the same route and also through the Caucasus about 650 B. C. and still later, in 270 B. C., the Gauls who, coming from northern Italy through Thrace, founded Galatia. So far as our present information goes little or no trace of these invasions remains in the existing populations of Anatolia. The expansions of the Persians and the Aryanization of their empire and the conquests of the Nordics east and south of the Caspian-Aral Sea, will be discussed in connection with the spread of Aryan languages.
XI — Racial Aptitudes
Such are the three races, the Alpine, the Mediterranean and the Nordic, which enter into the composition of European populations of to-day and in various combinations comprise the great bulk of white men all over the world. These races vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically. Moral, intellectual and spiritual attributes are as persistent as physical characters and are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation. These moral and physical characters are not limited to one race but given traits do occur with more frequency in one race than in another. Each race differs in the relative proportion of what we may term good and bad strains, just as nations do, or, for that matter, sections and classes of the same nation.
In considering skull characters we must remember that, while indicative of independent descent, the size and shape of the head are not closely related to brain power. Aristotle was a Mediterranean if we may trust the authenticity of his busts and had a small, long skull, while Humboldt’s large and characteristically Nordic skull was equally dolichocephalic. Socrates and Diogenes were apparently quite un-Greek and represent remnants of some early race, perhaps of Paleolithic man. The history of their lives indicates that each was recognized by his fellow countrymen as in some degree alien, just as the Jews apparently regarded Christ as, in some indefinite way, non-Jewish.
Mental, spiritual and moral traits are closely associated with the physical distinctions among the different European races, although like somatological characters, these spiritual attributes have in many cases gone astray. Enough remain, however, to show that certain races have special aptitudes for certain pursuits.
The Alpine race is always and everywhere a race of peasants, an agricultural and never a maritime race. In fact they only extend to salt water at the head of the Adriatic and, like all purely agricultural communities throughout Europe, tend toward democracy, although they are submissive to authority both political and religious being usually Roman Catholics in western Europe. This race is essentially of the soil and in towns the type is mediocre and bourgeois.
The coastal and seafaring populations of northern Europe are everywhere Nordic as far as the shores of Spain and among Europeans this race is pre-eminently fitted for maritime pursuits. Enterprise at sea during the Middle Ages was in the hands of Mediterraneans just as it was originally developed by Cretans, Phœnicians and Carthaginians but after the Reformation the Nordics seized and occupied this field almost exclusively.
The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant and democratic character of the Alpines. The Nordic race is domineering, individualistic, self-reliant and jealous of their personal freedom both in political and religious systems and as a result they are usually Protestants. Chivalry and knighthood and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part to the north.
The social status of woman varies largely with race but here religion plays a part. In the Roman Republic and in ancient Germany women were held in high esteem. In the Nordic countries of to-day women’s rights have received much more recognition than among the southern nations with their traditions of Latin culture. To this general statement modern Germany is a marked exception. The contrast is great between the mental attitude toward woman of the ancient Teutons and that of the modern Germans.
The pure Nordic peoples are characterized by a greater stability and steadiness than are mixed peoples such as the Irish, the ancient Gauls and the Athenians among all of whom the lack of these qualities was balanced by a correspondingly greater versatility.
The mental characteristics of the Mediterranean race are well known and this race, while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordic and the Alpine, is probably the superior of both, certainly of the Alpines, in intellectual attainments. In the field of art its superiority to both the other European races is unquestioned, although in literature and in scientific research and discovery the Nordics far excel it.
Before leaving this interesting subject of the correlation of spiritual and moral traits with physical characters we may note that these influences are so deeply rooted in everyday consciousness that the modern novelist or playwright does not fail to make his hero a tall, blond, honest and somewhat stupid youth and his villain a small, dark and exceptionally intelligent individual of warped moral character. So in Celtic legend as in the Græco-Roman and mediæval romances, prince and princess are always fair, a fact rather indicating that the mass of the people were brunet at the time when the legends were taking shape. In fact, “fair” is a synonym for beauty. Most ancient tapestries show a blond earl on horseback and a dark-haired churl holding the bridle.
The gods of Olympus were almost all described as blond, and it would be difficult to imagine a Greek artist painting a brunet Venus. In church pictures all angels are blond, while the denizens of the lower regions revel in deep brunetness. “Non Angli sed angeli,” remarked Pope Gregory when he first saw Saxon children exposed for sale in the Roman slave-mart.
In depicting the crucifixion no artist hesitates to make the two thieves brunet in contrast to the blond Saviour. This is something more than a convention, as such quasi-authentic traditions as we have of our Lord strongly suggest his Nordic, possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes.
These and similar traditions clearly point to the relations of the one race to the other in classic, mediæval and modern times. How far they may be modified by democratic institutions and the rule of the majority remains to be seen.
The wars of the past two thousand years in Europe have been almost exclusively wars between the various nations of this race or between rulers of Nordic blood.
From a race point of view the present European conflict is essentially a civil war and nearly all the officers and a large proportion of the men on both sides are members of this race. It is the same old tragedy of mutual butchery and mutual destruction between Nordics, just as the Nordic nobility of Renaissance Italy seems to have been possessed with a blood mania to murder one another. It is the modern edition of the old Berserker blood rage and is class suicide on a gigantic scale.
At the beginning of the war it was difficult to say on which side there was the preponderance of Nordic blood. Flanders and northern France are more Nordic than south Germany, while the backbone of the armies that England put into the field as well as of those of her colonies was almost purely Nordic and a large proportion of the Russian army was of the same race. As heretofore stated, with America in the war, the greater part of the Nordics of the world are fighting against Germany.
Although the writer has limited carefully the use of the word “Teutonic” to that section of the Nordic race which originated in Scandinavia and which later spread over northern Europe, nevertheless this term is unfortunate because it is currently given a national and not a racial meaning and is used to denote the populations of the central empires. This popular use includes millions who are un-Teutonic and excludes millions of pure Teutonic blood who are outside of the political borders of Austria and Germany and who are bitterly hostile to the very name itself.
The present inhabitants of the German Empire, to say nothing of Austria, are only to a limited extent descendants of the ancient Teutonic tribes, being very largely Alpines, especially in the east and south. To abandon to the Germans and Austrians the exclusive right to the name Teuton or Teutonic would be to acquiesce in one of their most grandiose pretensions.
XII — Arya
Having shown the existence in Europe of three distinct subspecies of man and a single predominant group of languages called the Aryan or synthetic group, it remains to inquire to which of the three races can be assigned the honor of inventing, elaborating and introducing this most highly developed form of human speech. Our investigations will show that the facts point indubitably to an original unity between the Nordic or rather the Proto-Nordic race and the Proto-Aryan language or the generalized, ancestral, Aryan mother tongue.
Of the three claimants to the honor of being the original creator of the Aryan group of languages, we can at once dismiss the Mediterranean race. The members of this subspecies on the south shores of the Mediterranean, the Berbers and the Egyptians, and many peoples in western Asia speak now and have always spoken Anaryan tongues. We also know that the speech of the original Pelasgians was not Aryan, that in Crete remnants of Pre-Aryan speech persisted until about 500 B. C. and that the Hellenic language was introduced into Ægean countries from the north. In Italy the Etruscan in the north and the Messapian in the south were Anaryan languages and the ancestral form of Latin speech in the guise of Umbrian and Oscan came through the Alps from the countries beyond.
In Spain a Celtic language was introduced from the north about 500 B. C. but with so little force behind it that it was unable to replace entirely the Anaryan Basque language of at least a portion of the aborigines.
In Britain, Aryan speech was introduced about 800 B. C. and in France somewhat earlier. In central and northern Europe no certain trace of the Anaryan languages at one time spoken there persists, except among the Lapps and in the neighborhood of the Gulf of Finland, where Non-Aryan Finnic dialects are spoken to-day by the Finlanders and the Esthonians.
We thus know the approximate dates of the introduction of Aryan speech into western and southern Europe and that it came in through the medium of the Nordic race.
In Spain and in the adjoining parts of France nearly half a million people continue to speak an agglutinative language, called Basque or Euskarian. In skull shape these Basques correspond closely with the Aryan-speaking populations around them, being dolichocephalic in Spain and brachycephalic or pseudo-brachycephalic in France. In the case of both the long skulled and the round skulled Basques the lower part of the face is long and thin, with a peculiar and pointed chin and among the French Basques the skull is broadened in the temporal region. In other words, their faces show certain secondary racial characters which have been imposed by selection upon a people composed originally of two races of independent origin, but long isolated by the limitations of language.
The Euskarian language is believed to have been related to the ancient Iberian but has affinities which point to Asia as its place of origin and make possible the hypothesis that it may have been derived from the ancient language of the Proto-Alpines in the west.
The problem of the extinct Ligurian language must be considered in this connection. It seems to have been Anaryan, but we do not know whether it was the speech originally of Alpines or of Mediterraneans either of whom could be reasonably considered as a claimant.
Other than the Basque language there are in western Europe but few remains of Pre-Aryan speech, and these are found chiefly in place names and in a few obscure words.
Remnants of Anaryan speech exist here and there throughout European Russia, but many of them can be traced to historic invasions. Until we reach the main body of Ural-Altaic speech in the east of Russia, the Esthonians, with kindred tribes of Livonians and Tchouds, and the Finns are the only peoples who speak Non-Aryan tongues, but the physical type with the exception of the skull shape of all these tribes is distinctly Nordic. In this connection the Lapps and related groups in the far north can be disregarded.
The problem of the Finns is a difficult one. The coast of Finland, of course, is purely Swedish, but the great bulk of the population in the interior is brachycephalic, though otherwise thoroughly Nordic in type.
The Anaryan Finnish, Esthonian and Livonian languages were probably introduced at the same time as were round skulls into Finland. The shores of the Gulf of Finland were originally inhabited by Nordics and the intrusion of round skulled Finns probably came soon after the Christian era. This immigration and that of the Livonians and Esthonians may possibly have been part of the same movement which brought the Alpine Wends into eastern Germany. The earliest references to the Finns that we have locate them in central Russia.
The most important Anaryan language in Europe is the Magyar of Hungary, but this we know was introduced from the eastward at the end of the ninth century, as was the earlier but now extinct Avar.
In the Balkans the language of the Turks has never been a vernacular as it is in Asia Minor. In Europe it was spoken only by the soldiers and the civil administrators and by very sparse colonies of Turkish settlers. The mania of the Turks for white women, which is said to have been one of the motives that led to the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, has unconsciously resulted in the obliteration of the Mongoloid type of the original Asiatic invaders. Persistent crossing with Circassian and Georgian women, as well as with slaves of every race in Asia Minor and in Europe with whom they came in contact, has made the European Turk of to-day indistinguishable in physical characters from his Christian neighbors. At the same time, polygamy has greatly strengthened the hold of the dominant Turk. In fact, among the upper classes of the higher races monogamy and the resultant limitation in number of offspring has been a source of weakness from the viewpoint of race expansion. The Turks of Seljukian and Osmanli origin were never numerous and the Sultan’s armies were largely composed of Islamized Anatolians and Europeans.
In Persia and India, also, the Aryan languages were introduced from the north at known periods, so in view of all these facts the Mediterranean race cannot claim the honor of either the invention or dissemination of the synthetic languages.
The chief claim of the Alpine race of central Europe and western Asia to the invention and introduction into Europe of the Proto-Aryan form of speech rests on the fact that nearly all the members of this race in Europe speak well developed Aryan languages, chiefly in some form of Slavic. This fact taken by itself may have no more significance than the fact that the Mediterranean race in Spain, Italy and France speaks Romance languages, but it is, nevertheless, an argument of some weight.
Outside of Europe the Armenians and other Armenoid brachycephalic peoples of Asia Minor and the Iranian Highlands, all of Alpine race, together with a few isolated tribes of the Caucasus, speak Aryan languages and these peoples lie on the highroad along which knowledge of the metals and other cultural developments entered Europe.
If the Aryan language were invented and developed by these Armenoid Alpines we should be obliged to assume that they introduced it along with bronze culture into Europe about 3000 B. C. and taught the Nordics both their language and their metal culture. There are, however, in western Asia many Alpine peoples who do not speak Aryan languages and yet are Alpine in type, such as the Turcomans and in Asia Minor the so-called Turks are also largely Islamized Alpines of the Armenoid subspecies who speak Turki. There is no trace of Aryan speech south of the Caucasus until after 1700 B. C. and the Hittite language spoken before that date in central and eastern Asia Minor, although not yet clearly deciphered, was Anaryan to the best of our present knowledge. The Hittites themselves were probably ancestral to the living Armenians.
We are sufficiently acquainted with the languages of the ancient Mesopotamian countries to know that the speech of Accad and Sumer, of Susa and Media was agglutinative and that the languages of Assyria and of Palestine were Semitic. The speech of the Kassites was Anaryan, but they seem to have been in contact with the horse-using Nordics and some of their leaders bore Aryan names. The language of the shortlived empire of the Mitanni in the foothills south of Armenia is the only one about the character of which there can be serious doubt. There is, therefore, much negative evidence against the existence of Aryan speech in that part of the world earlier than its known introduction by Nordics.
If, then, the last great expansion into Europe of the Alpine race brought from Asia the Aryan mother tongue, as well as the knowledge of metals, we must assume that all the members of the Nordic race thereupon adopted synthetic speech from the Alpines.
We know that these Alpines reached Britain about 1800 B. C. and probably they had previously occupied much of Gaul, so that if they are to be credited with the introduction of the synthetic languages into western Europe, it is difficult to understand why we have no known trace of any form of Aryan speech in central Europe or west of the Rhine prior to 1000 B. C. while we have some, though scanty, evidence of Non-Aryan languages.
It may be said in favor of this claim of the Alpine race to be the original inventor of synthetic speech, that language is ever a measure of culture and the higher forms of civilization are greatly hampered by the limitations of speech imposed by the less highly evolved languages, namely, the monosyllabic and the agglutinative, which include nearly all the Non-Aryan languages of the world. It does not seem probable that barbarians, however fine in physical type and however well endowed with the potentiality of intellectual and moral development, dwelling as hunters in the bleak and barren north along the edge of the retreating glaciers and as nomad shepherds in the Russian grasslands, could have evolved a more complicated and higher form of articulate speech than the inhabitants of southwestern Asia, who many thousand years earlier were highly civilized and are known to have invented the arts of agriculture, metal working and domestication of animals, as well as of writing and pottery. Nevertheless, such seems to be the fact.
To summarize, it appears that a study of the Mediterranean race shows that so far from being purely European, it is equally African and Asiatic and that in the narrow coastal fringe of southern Persia, in India and even farther east the last strains of this race gradually fade into the Negroids through prolonged cross breeding. A similar inquiry into the origin and distribution of the Alpine subspecies shows clearly the fundamentally Asiatic origin of the type and that on its easternmost borders in central Asia it marches with the round skulled Mongols, and that neither the one nor the other was the inventor of Aryan speech.
XIII — Origin of the Aryan Languages
By the process of elimination set forth in the preceding chapter we are competed to acknowledge that the strongest claimant for the honor of being the race of the original Aryans, is the tall, blond Nordic. An analysis of the various languages of the Aryan group reveals an extreme diversity which can be best explained by the hypothesis that the existing languages are now spoken by people upon whom Aryan speech has been forced from without. This theory corresponds exactly with the known historic fact that the Aryan languages, during the last three or four thousand years at least have, again and again, been imposed by Nordics upon populations of Alpine and Mediterranean blood.
Within the present distributional area of the Nordic race on the Gulf of Riga and in the very middle of a typical area of isolation, are the most generalized members of the Aryan group, namely Lettish and Lithuanian, both almost Proto-Aryan in character. Close at hand existed the closely related Old Prussian or Borussian, very recently extinct. These archaic languages are relatively close to Sanskrit and exist in actual contact with the Anaryan speech of the Esthonians and Finns.
The Anaryan languages in eastern Russia are Ugrian, a form of speech which extends far into Asia and which appears to contain elements which unite it with synthetic speech and may be dimly transitory in character. In the opinion of many philologists, a primitive form of Ugrian might have given birth to the Proto-Aryan ancestor of existing synthetic languages.
This hypothesis, if sustained by further study, will provide additional evidence that the site of the development of the Aryan languages and of the Nordic subspecies was in eastern Europe, in a region which is close to the meeting place between the most archaic synthetic languages and the most nearly related Anaryan tongue, the agglutinative Ugrian.
The Aryan tongue was introduced into Greece by the Achæans about 1400 B. C. and later, about 1100 B. C. by the true Hellenes, who brought in the classic dialects of Dorian, Ionian and Æolian.
These Aryan languages superseded their Anaryan predecessor, the Pelasgian. From the language of these early invaders came the Illyrian, Thracian, Albanian, classic Greek and the debased modern Romaic, a descendant of the Ionian dialect.
Aryan speech was introduced among the Anaryan-speaking Etruscans of the Italian Peninsula by the Umbrians and Oscans about 1100 B. C. and from the language of these conquerors was derived Latin which later spread to the uttermost confines of the Roman Empire. Its descendants to-day are the Romance tongues spoken within the ancient imperial boundaries, Portuguese on the west, Castilian, Catalan, Provençal, French, the Langue d’oïl of the Walloons, Romansch, Ladin, Friulian, Tuscan, Calabrian and Rumanian.
The problem of the existence of a language clearly descended from Latin, the Rumanian, in the eastern Carpathians cut off by Slavic and Magyar tongues from the nearest Romance tongues presents difficulties. The Rumanians themselves make two claims; the first, which can be safely disregarded, is an unbroken linguistic descent from a group of Aryan languages which occupied this whole section of Europe, from which Latin was derived and of which Albanian is also a remnant.
The more serious claim, however, made by the Rumanians is to linguistic and racial descent from the military colonists planted by the Emperor Trajan in the great Dacian plain north of the Danube. This may be possible, so far as the language is concerned, but there are some weighty objections to it.
We have little evidence for, and much against, the existence of Rumanian speech north of the Danube for nearly a thousand years after Rome abandoned this outlying region. Dacia was one of the last provinces to be occupied by Rome and was the first from which the legions were withdrawn upon the decline of the Empire. The northern Carpathians, furthermore, where the Rumanians claim to have taken refuge during the barbarian invasions formed part of the Slavic homeland and it was in these same mountains and in the Ruthenian districts of eastern Galicia that the Slavic languages were developed, probably by the Sarmatians and Venethi, from whence they spread in all directions in the centuries that immediately followed the fall of Rome. So it is almost impossible to credit the survival of a frontier community of Romanized natives situated not only in the path of the great invasions of Europe from the east, but also in the very spot where Slavic tongues were at the time evolving.
Rumanian speech occupies large areas outside of the present kingdom of Rumania, in Russian Bessarabia, Austrian Bukowina and above all in Hungarian Transylvania.
The linguistic problem is further complicated by the existence in the Pindus Mountains of Thessaly of another large community of Vlachs of Rumanian speech. How this later community could have survived from Roman times until to-day, untouched either by the Greek language of the Byzantine Empire or by the Turkish conquest is another difficult problem.
The evidence, on the whole, points to the descent of the Vlachs from the early inhabitants of Thrace, who adopted Latin speech in the first centuries of the Christian era and clung to it during the domination of the Bulgarians from the seventh century onward in the lands south of the Danube. In the thirteenth century the mass of these Vlachs, leaving scattered remnants behind them, crossed the Danube and founded Little and Great Wallachia. From there they spread into Transylvania and a century later into Moldavia.
The solution of this problem receives no assistance from anthropology, as these Rumanian-speaking populations both on the Danube and in the Pindus Mountains in no way differ physically from their neighbors on all sides. But through whatever channel they acquired their Latin speech the Rumanians of to-day can lay no valid claim to blood descent even in a remote degree from the true Romans.
The first Aryan languages known in western Europe were the Celtic group which first appears west of the Rhine about 1000 B. C.
Only a few dim traces of Pre-Aryan speech have been found in the British Isles, and these largely in place names. The Pre-Aryan language of the Pre-Nordic population of Britain may have survived down to historic times as Pictish.
In Britain, Celtic speech was introduced in two successive waves, first by the Goidels or “Q” Celts, who apparently appeared about 800 B. C. and this form exists to this day as Erse in western Ireland, as Manx of the Isle of Man and as Gaelic in the Scottish Highlands.
The Goidels were still in a state of bronze culture. When they reached Britain they must have found there a population preponderantly of Mediterranean type with numerous remains of still earlier races of Paleolithic times and also some round skulled Alpines of the Round Barrows, who have since largely faded from the living population. When the next invasion, the Cymric or Brythonic, occurred the Goidels had been absorbed very largely by the underlying Mediterranean aborigines who had meanwhile accepted the Goidelic form of Celtic speech, just as on the continent the Gauls had mixed with Alpine and Mediterranean natives and had imposed upon the conquered their own tongue. In fact, in Britain, Gaul and Spain the Goidels and Gauls were chiefly a ruling, military class, while the great bulk of the population remained unchanged although Aryanized in speech.
These Brythonic or Cymric tribes or “P” Celts followed the “Q” Celts four or five hundred years later, and drove the Goidels westward through Germany, Gaul and Britain and this movement of population was still going on when Cæsar crossed the Channel. The Brythonic group gave rise to the modern Cornish, extinct within a century, the Cymric of Wales and the Armorican of Brittany.
In central Europe we find traces of these same two forms of Celtic speech with the Goidelic everywhere the older and the Cymric the more recent arrival. The cleavage between the dialects of the “Q” Celts and the “P” Celts was probably less marked two thousand years ago than at present, since in their modern form they are both Neo-Celtic languages. What vestiges of Celtic languages remain in France belong to Brythonic. Celtic was not generally spoken in Aquitaine in Cæsar’s time.
When the two Celtic-speaking races came into conflict in Britain their original relationship had been greatly obscured by the crossing of the Goidels with the underlying dark Mediterranean race of Neolithic culture and by the mixture of the Belgæ with Teutonic tribes. The result was that the Brythons did not distinguish between the blond Goidels and the brunet but Celticized Mediterraneans as they all spoke Goidelic dialects.
In the same way when the Saxons and the Angles entered Britain they found there a population speaking Celtic of some form, either Goidelic or Cymric and promptly called them all Welsh (foreigners). These Welsh were preponderantly of Mediterranean type with some mixture of a blond Goidel strain and a much stronger blond strain of Cymric origin and these same elements exist to-day in England. The Mediterranean race is easily distinguished, but the physical types derived from Goidel and Brython alike are merged and lost in the later floods of pure Nordic blood, Angle, Saxon, Dane, Norse and Norman. In this primitive, dark population with successive layers of blond Nordics imposed upon it, each one more purely Nordic and in the relative absence of round heads lie the secret and the solution of the anthropology of the British Isles. This Iberian substratum was able to absorb to a large extent the earlier Celtic-speaking invaders, both Goidels and Brythons, but it is only just beginning to seriously threaten the later Nordics and to reassert its ancient brunet characters after three thousand years of submergence.
In northwest Scotland there is a Gaelic-speaking area where the place names are all Scandinavian and the physical types purely Nordic. This is the only spot in the British Isles where Celtic speech has reconquered a district from the Teutonic languages and it was the site of one of the conquests of the Norse Vikings, probably in the early centuries of the Christian era. In Caithness in north Scotland, as well as in some isolated spots on the Irish coasts, the language of these same Norse pirates persisted within a century. In the fifth century of our era and after the break-up of Roman domination in Britain there was much racial unrest and a back wave of Goidels crossed from Ireland and either reintroduced or reinforced the Gaelic speech in the highlands. Later, Goidelic speech was gradually driven northward and westward by the intrusive English of the lowlands and was ultimately forced over this originally Norse-speaking area. We have elsewhere in Europe evidence of similar shiftings of speech without any corresponding change in the blood of the population.
Except in the British Isles and in Brittany Celtic languages have left no modern descendants, but have everywhere been replaced by languages of Neo-Latin or of Teutonic origin. Outside of Brittany one of the last, if not quite the last, reference to Celtic speech in Gaul is the historic statement that “Celtic” tribes, as well as “Armoricans,” took part at Châlons in the great victory in 451 A. D. over Attila the Hun and his confederacy of subject nations.
On the continent the only existing populations of Celtic speech are the primitive inhabitants of central Brittany, a population noted for their religious fanaticism and for other characteristics of a backward people. This Celtic speech is claimed to have been introduced about 450–500 A. D. by Britons fleeing from the Saxons. These refugees, if there were any substantial number of them, must have been dolichocephs of either Mediterranean or Nordic race or both. We are asked by this tradition to believe that their long skull was lost, but that their language was adopted by the round skulled Alpine population of Armorica. It is much more probable that the Cymric-speaking Alpines of Brittany have merely retained in this isolated corner of France a form of Celtic speech which was prevalent throughout northern Gaul and Britain before these provinces were conquered by Rome and Latinized and which, perhaps, was reinforced later by British Cymry. Cæsar remarked that there was little difference between the speech of the Belgæ in northern Gaul and in Britain. In both cases the speech was Cymric.
Long after the conquest of Gaul by the Goths and Franks Teutonic speech remained predominant among the ruling classes and, by the time it succumbed to the Latin tongue of the Romanized natives, the old Celtic languages had been entirely forgotten outside of Brittany.
An example of similar changes of language is to be found in Normandy where the country was inhabited by the Nordic Belgæ speaking a Cymric language before that tongue was replaced by Latin. This coast was ravaged about 300 or 400 A. D. by Saxons who formed settlements along both sides of the Channel and the coasts of Brittany which were later known as the Litus Saxonicum. Their progress can best be traced by place names as our historic record of these raids is scanty.
The Normans landed in Normandy in the year 911 A. D. They were heathen, Danish barbarians, speaking a Teutonic tongue. The religion, culture and language of the old Romanized populations worked a miracle in the transformation of everything except blood in one short century. So quick was the change that 155 years later the descendants of the same Normans landed in England as Christian Frenchmen armed with all the culture of their period. The change was startling, but the Norman blood remained unchanged and entered England as a substantially Nordic type.
XIV — The Aryan Language in Asia
In the Ægean region and south of the Caucasus Nordics appear after 1700 B. C. but there were unquestionably invasions and raids from the north for many centuries previous to our first records. These early migrations were probably not in sufficient force to modify the blood of the autochthonous races or to substitute Aryan languages for the ancient Mediterranean and Asiatic tongues.
These men of the North came from the grasslands of Russia in successive waves and among the first of whom we have fairly clear knowledge were the Achæans and Phrygians. Aryan names are mentioned in the dim chronicles of the Mesopotamian empires about 1700 B. C. among the Kassites and later, Mitanni. Aryan names of prisoners captured beyond the mountains in the north and of Aryan deities before whom oaths were taken are recorded about 1400 B. C. but one of the first definite accounts of Nordics south of the Caucasus describes the presence of Nordic Persians at Lake Urmia about 900 B. C. There were many incursions from that time on, the Cimmerians raiding across the Caucasus as early as 650 B. C. and shortly afterward overrunning all Asia Minor.
The easterly extension of the Russian steppes or Kiptchak north of the Caspian-Aral Sea in Turkestan as far as the foothills of the Pamirs was occupied by the Sacæ or Massagetæ, who were also Nordics and akin to the Cimmerians and Persians, as were, perhaps, the Ephtalites or White Huns in Sogdiana north of Persia, destroyed by the Turks in the sixth century.
For several centuries groups of Nordics drifted as nomad shepherds across the Caucasus into the empire of the Medes, introducing little by little the Aryan tongue which later developed into Old Persian. By 550 B. C. these Persians had become sufficiently numerous to overthrow their rulers and under the leadership of the great Cyrus they organized the Persian Empire, one of the most enduring of Oriental states. The base of the population of the Persian Empire rested on the round skulled Medes who belonged to the Armenoid subdivision of the Alpines. Under the leadership of their priestly caste of Magi these Medes rebelled again and again against their Nordic masters before the two peoples became fused.
From 525 to 485 B. C. during the reign of Darius, whose sculptured portraits show a man of pure Nordic type, the tall, blond Persians had become almost exclusively a class of great ruling nobles and had forgotten the simplicity of their shepherd ancestors. Their language belonged to the Eastern or Iranian division of Aryan speech and was known as Old Persian, which continued to be spoken until the fourth century before the Christian era. From it were derived Pehlevi, or Parthian as well as modern Persian. The great book of the old Persians, the Avesta, which was written in Zendic, also an Iranian language, does not go back to the reign of Darius and was remodelled after the Christian era, but the Old Persian of Darius was closely related to the Zendic of Bactria and to the Sanskrit of Hindustan. From Zendic, also called Medic, are derived Ghalcha, Balochi, Kurdish and other dialects.
The rise to imperial power of the dolichocephalic Aryan-speaking Persians was largely due to the genius of their leaders but the Aryanization of western Asia by them is one of the most amazing events in history. The whole region became completely transformed so far as the acceptance by the conquered of the language and religion of the Persians was concerned, but the blood of the Nordic race quickly became diluted and a few centuries later disappears from history.
During the great wars with Greece the pure Persian blood was still unimpaired and in control. In the literature of the time there is little evidence of race antagonism between the Greek and the Persian leaders although their rival cultures were sharply contrasted. In the time of Alexander the Great the pure Persian blood was obviously confined to the nobles and it was the policy of Alexander to Hellenize the Persians and to amalgamate his Greeks with them. The amount of pure Macedonian blood was not sufficient to reinforce the Nordic strain of the Persians and the net result was the entire loss of the Greek stock.
It is a question whether the Armenians of Asia Minor derived their Aryan speech from this invasion of the Nordic Persians, or whether they received it at an earlier date from the Phrygians and from the west. These Phrygians entered Asia Minor by way of the Dardanelles and broke up the Hittite Empire. Their language was Aryan and probably was related to Thracian. In favor of the theory of the introduction of the Armenian language by the Phrygians from the west, rather than by the Persians from the east, is the highly significant fact that the basic structure of that tongue shows its relationship to be with the western or Centum rather than with the eastern or Satem group of Aryan languages and this, too, in spite of a very large Persian vocabulary.
The Armenians themselves, like all the other natives of the plateaux and highlands as far east as the Hindu Kush Mountains, while of Aryan speech, are of the Armenoid subdivision, in sharp contrast to the predominant types south of the mountains in Persia, Afghanistan and Hindustan, all of which are dolichocephalic and of Mediterranean affinity but generally betraying traces of admixture with still more ancient races of Negroid origin, especially in India.
We now come to the last and easternmost extension of Aryan languages in Asia. As mentioned above, the grasslands and steppes of Russia extend north of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea to ancient Bactria, now Turkestan. This whole country was occupied by the Nordic Sacæ and the closely related Massagetæ. These Sacæ may be identical with the later Scythians.
Soon after the opening of the second millennium B. C. and perhaps even earlier, the first Nordics crossed over the Afghan passes, entered the plains of India and organized a state in the Punjab, “the land of the five rivers,” bringing with them Aryan speech to a population probably of Mediterranean type and represented to-day by the Dravidians. The Nordic Sacæ arrived later in India and introduced the Vedas, religious poems, which were at first transmitted orally but which were reduced to written form in Old Sanskrit by the Brahmans at the comparatively late date of 300 A. D. From this classic Sanskrit are derived all the modern Aryan languages of Hindustan, as well as the Singalese of Ceylon and the chief dialects of Assam.
There is great diversity among scholars as to the date of the first entry of these Aryan-speaking tribes into the Punjab but the consensus of opinion seems to indicate a period between 1600 and 1700 B. C. or even somewhat earlier. However, the very close affinity of Sanskrit to the Old Persian of Darius and to the Zendavesta would strongly indicate that the final introduction of Aryan languages in the form of Sanskrit occurred at a much later time. The most recent tendency is to bring these dates somewhat forward.
If close relationship between languages indicates correlation in time then the entry of the Sacæ into India would appear to have been nearly simultaneous with the crossing of the Caucasus by the Nordic Cimmerians and their Persian successors.
The relationship between the Zendavesta and the Sanskrit Vedas is as near as that between High and Low German and consequently such close affinity prevents our thrusting back the date of the separation of the Persians and the Sacæ more than a few centuries.
A simultaneous migration of nomad shepherds on both sides of the Caspian-Aral Sea would naturally occur in a general movement southward and such migrations may have taken place several times. In all probability these Nordic invasions occurred one after another for a thousand years or more, the later ones obscuring and blurring the memory of their predecessors.
When shepherd tribes leave their grasslands and attack their agricultural neighbors, the reason is nearly always a famine due to prolonged drought and causes such as these have again and again in history put the nomad tribes in motion over large areas. During many centuries fresh tribes composed of Nordics or under the leadership of Nordics but all Aryan-speaking, poured over the Afghan passes from the northwest and pushed before them the earlier arrivals. Clear traces of these successive floods of conquerors are to be found in the Vedas themselves.
The Zendic form of the Iranian group of Aryan languages was spoken by those Sacæ who remained in old Bactria and from it is derived a whole group of closely related dialects still used in the Pamirs of which Ghalcha is the best known.
The Sacæ and Massagetæ were, like the Persians, tall, blond dolichocephs and they have left behind them dim traces of their blood among the living Mongolized nomads of Turkestan, the Kirghizes. Ancient Bactria maintained its Nordic and Aryan aspect long after Alexander’s time and did not become Mongolized and receive the sinister name of Turkestan until the seventh century, when it was the first victim of the series of ferocious invasions from the north and east, which under various Mongol leaders destroyed civilization in Asia and threatened its existence in Europe. These conquests culminated in 1241 A. D. at Wahlstatt in Silesia where the Germans, though themselves badly defeated, put a final limit to this westward rush of Asiatics.
The Sacæ were the most easterly members of the Nordic race of whom we have definite record. The Chinese knew well these “green eyed devils,” whom they called by their Tatar name, the “Wu-suns,”—the tall ones—and with whom they came into contact about 200 B. C. in what is now Chinese Turkestan. Other Nordic tribes are recorded in this region. Evidence is accumulating that central Asia had a large Nordic population in the centuries preceding the Christian era. The discovery of the Aryan Tokharian language in Chinese Turkestan considered in connection with other facts indicates intensive occupation by Nordics of territories in central Asia now wholly Mongol, just as in Europe dark-haired Alpines occupy large territories where in Roman times fair-haired Nordics were preponderant. In short we find both in Europe and in western and central Asia the same record of Nordic decline during the last two thousand years and their replacement by races of inferior value and civilization.
This Tokharian is undoubtedly a pure Aryan language related, curiously enough, to the western group rather than to the Indo-Iranian. It has been deciphered from inscriptions recently found in northeast Turkestan and was a living language prior to the ninth century A. D.
Of all the wonderful conquests of the Sacæ there remain as evidence of their invasions only these Indian and Afghan languages. Dim traces of their blood have been found in the Pamirs and in Afghanistan, but in the south their blond traits have vanished, even from the Punjab. It may be that the stature of some of the Afghan hill tribes and of the Sikhs and some of the facial characters of the latter are derived from this source, but all blondness of skin, hair or eye of the original Sacæ has utterly vanished.
The long skulls all through India are to be attributed to the Mediterranean race rather than to this Nordic invasion, while the Pre-Dravidians and Negroids of south India, with which the former are largely mixed, are also dolichocephs.
In short, the introduction in Iran and India of Aryan languages, Iranian, Ghalchic and Sanskrit, represents a linguistic and not an ethnic conquest.
In concluding this revision of the racial foundations upon which the history of Europe has been based it is scarcely necessary to point out that the actual results of the spectacular conquests and invasions of history have been far less permanent than those of the more insidious victories arising from the crossing of two diverse races and that in such mixtures the relative prepotency of the various human subspecies in Europe appears to be in inverse ratio to their social value.
The continuity of physical traits and the limitation of the effects of environment to the individual only are now so thoroughly recognized by scientists that it is at most a question of time when the social consequences which result from such crossings will be generally understood by the public at large. As soon as the true bearing and import of the facts are appreciated by lawmakers a complete change in our political structure will inevitably occur and our present reliance on the influence of education will be superseded by a readjustment based on racial values.
Bearing in mind the extreme antiquity of physical and spiritual characters and the persistency with which they outlive those elements of environment termed language, nationality and forms of government, we must consider the relation of these facts to the development of the race in America. We may be certain that the progress of evolution is in full operation to-day under those laws of nature which control it and that the only sure guide to the future lies in the study of the operation of these laws in the past.
We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all “distinctions of race, creed or color,” the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.
Notes
1. The Middle Paleolithic Period is suggested here for the first time.—Editor’s Note.
2. After Henry Fairfield Osborn, 1915.
3. Procopius tells a significant story which illustrates the contrast in racial character between the natives and the barbarians. He relates that, at the surrender of Ravenna in 540 A. D. by the Goths to the army of the Byzantines, “when the Gothic women saw how swarthy, small men of mean aspect had conquered their tall, robust, fair-skinned barbarians, they were furious and spat in their husbands’ faces and cursed them for cowards.”