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.

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.

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.”