Popular Science Monthly/Volume 50/February 1897/The Racial Geography of Europe: Language, Nationality, and Race I

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(Lowell Institute Lectures, 1896.)




THE historian of The Norman Conquest of England was very fond of contrasting the east and the west of Europe. He maintained that the political unrest which underlies the Eastern question was due to the utter lack of physical assimilation among the people of the Balkan states; that, in other words, nationality had no foundation in race. This was undoubtedly true to some extent; and yet even in the west, the formation of these boasted nationalities is so recent that it accords but slightly with the lines of physical descent. A slight scratch of the skin of neighbors suffices to reveal radical differences of blood, so that the west is merely a step in advance of the east after all. It is a trite observation that all over Europe population has been laid down in different strata more or less horizontal. In the east of Europe this stratification is recent and distinct. West of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the primitive layers have become metamorphosed, to borrow a geological term, by the fusing heat of nationality and the pressure of civilization. The population of the east of Europe structurally is as different from that of the west to the naked eye as, to complete our simile, sandstone is from granite; nevertheless, despite their apparent homogeneity on analysis we may still read the history of these western nations by the aid of natural science from the purely physical characteristics of their people alone.

To the ordinary observer a uniform layer of population is spread over the continent as waters cover the earth. In reality, while apparently at rest, this great body of men reveals itself today in constant motion internally. Currents and counter-currents sweep hither and thither, some rising and others falling, with now and then a quiet pool or eddy where alone population is really in a quiescent state. These movements are not transient; they have been going on for centuries, determined by the economic character and the geography of the continent. They are shifting suddenly now with modern industrial life, but they have persisted until the present through generations. Proof of this antiquity we have; where Nature has isolated little pools since, of population, we may still find men with an unbroken ancestral lineage reaching back to a time when the climate, the flora and fauna of Europe were far different from those which prevail to-day. This may be shown, not by historical documents, for these men antedate all written history, but by physical traits which are older than institutions and outlast them all as well.

This varied population, as we see it to-day, is in its racial composition the effect of a long train of circumstances, historical upon the surface, social it may be in part, but at bottom also geographical. From these effects, and from the migrations even now going on, we may seek out the causes—many of which have hitherto been neglected by students of institutions—which have been operative for centuries, and which have gone on in spite of political events or else have indirectly given rise to them. Progress in social life has not been cataclysmic; it has not taken place by kangaroo-leaps of political or social reforms on paper; but it has gone on slowly, painfully perhaps, and almost imperceptibly, by the constant pressure of slight but fixed causes. Our problem is to examine certain of these fundamental mainsprings of movement, especially the influence of the physical environment; and to do it by means of the calipers, the measuring tape, and the color scale. Science proceeds best from the known present to the remote past, in anthropology as in geology or astronomy. The study of living men should precede that of the dead. This shall be our method. Fixing our attention upon the present population, we shall then be prepared to interpret the physical migrations and to some extent the social movements which have been going on for generations in the past.

Let us at the outset avoid the error of confusing community of language with identity of race. Nationality may often follow linguistic boundaries, but race bears no necessary relation whatever to them. Two essentials of political unity are bound up in identity of language—namely, the necessity of a free interchange of ideas by means of a common mental circulating medium; and, secondly, the possession of a fund of common traditions in history or literature. The first is largely a practical consideration; the second forms the subtle essence of nationality itself. For these reasons we shall find language corresponding with political affiliations far more often than with ethnic boundaries.[1] Politics may indeed become a factor in the physical sense, especially when re-enforced by language. It can not be denied that assimilation in blood often depends upon identity of speech, or that political frontiers sometimes coincide with a racial differentiation of population. The canton of Schaffhausen lies north of the Rhine, a deep inset into the grand duchy of Baden, yet its people, though isolated from their Swiss countrymen across the river, are intensely patriotic. In race as in political affairs they are distinctly divided from their immediate German neighbors. Mentally holding to the Swiss people, they have unconsciously generated a physical individuality akin to them as well. Thus it is possible that a sense of nationality once aroused may become an active factor through selection in the anthropological sense. Nevertheless, this phenomenon requires more time than most political history has at its disposition, so that in the main our proposition remains true. Despite the political hatred of the French for the German, no appreciable effect in a physical sense has yet resulted, nor will it until the lapse of generations.

Consideration of our linguistic map of the southwest of Europe will serve to illustrate some of the potent political influences which make for community of language without thereby indicating any influence of race. The Iberian Peninsula, now divided between two nationalities, the Spanish and the Portuguese, is, as we shall subsequently show, in the main homogeneous racially—more so, in fact, than any other equally large area of Europe. The only exception is in the case of the Basques, whom we must consider by themselves. This physically uniform population, exclusive of the Basque, makes use to-day of three distinct languages, all Romance or Latin in their origin, to be sure, but so far differentiated from one another as to be mutually unintelligible. It is said, for example, that the Castilian peasant can more readily understand Italian than the dialect of his neighbor and compatriot, the Catalan. The gap between the Portuguese and the Castilian or true Spanish is less deep and wide, perhaps; but the two are still very distinct and radically different from the language spoken in the eastern provinces of Spain. The Catalan speech is, as the related tints upon our map imply, only a sub-variety of the Provencal or southern French language. The people of the Balearic Islands speaking this Catalan tongue differ from the French in language but little more than do the Corsicans.[2]

At first glance all this seems to belie our assertion that unity of language is often a historical product of political causes. For it may justly be objected that the Portuguese type of language, although in general limited by the political boundary along the east, has crossed the northern frontier and now prevails throughout the Spanish province of Galicia; or again, that the French-Spanish political frontier has been powerless to restrain the advance, far toward the Strait of Gibraltar, of the Catalan speech, closely allied as we have said to the dialects of Provence

PSM V50 D475 Languages and dialects surrounding Iberia.jpg

in southern France; that not even the slight line of demarcation between these last two lies along the Pyrenean political boundary, but considerably to the north of it, so that Catalan is to-day spoken over nearly a whole department in France; and, lastly, that the Basque language, utterly removed from any affiliation with all the rest, lies neither on one side nor the other of this same Pyrenean frontier, but extends down both slopes of the mountain range, an insert into both national domains of France and Spain. These objections are, however, the very basis of our contention that language and nationality often stand in a definite relation to one another: for, if we examine the history of Spain and Portugal, we shall discover that historical causes alone have determined this curious linguistic distribution.

The three great languages in the Iberian Peninsula—Castilian or Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan—correspond respectively to the three political agencies which drove out the Moorish invaders from the ninth century onward from three different directions and from distinct geographical centers. The mountains of Galicia, in the extreme northwest, served as the nucleus of the resistant power which afterward merged itself in the Portuguese

PSM V50 D476 Languages and dialects in the united kingdom.jpg

monarchy. Castile in the central north was the asylum of the refugees, expelled from the south by the Saracens, who afterward reasserted themselves in force under the leadership of the kings of Castile. Aragon in the northeast, whose people were mainly of Catalan speech, which they had derived from the south of France, during their temporary forced sojourn in that country while the Moors were in active control of Spain, was a base of supplies for the third organized opposition to the invaders. Each of these political units, as it reconquered territory from the Moors, imposed its official speech upon the people, where it remains to-day. Were the present Spanish nation old enough and sufficiently unified; were the component parts of it more firmly knitted together by education, modern means of transport, and economic interests; this disunity of speech might disappear. Unfortunately, the character of the Iberian Peninsula is such—arid, infertile, and sparsely populated in the interior—that these languages socially and commercially turn their backs to one another. Of necessity, they do this also along the frontier between Spain and Portugal. The eyes of each community are directed not toward Madrid, but toward the sea; for there on the fertile littoral alone, is there the economic possibility of a population sufficiently dense for unification. Thus the divergence of language is truly the expression of natural causes working through political ones, which promise to perpetuate the differences for some time. As for the Basques, they have been politically independent both of the French and the Spaniards until within a few years, and have been enabled to preserve their unique speech largely for this reason. But now that their political autonomy has begun to disappear, the official Spanish is pressing the Basque language so forcibly that it seems to be everywhere on the retreat.

We have seen that community of language is often imposed as a result of political unity. But it is, after all, rather a by-product, so that it often fails even here to indicate nationality. Its irresponsibility in respect both of nationality and of race is clearly indicated by the present linguistic status of the British Isles.[3] As our map shows, the Keltic language is now spoken in the remote and mountainous portions of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as across the English Channel in French Brittany. Are we to infer from this that in these several places we have to do with vestiges of a so-called Keltic race which possesses any physical traits in common? Far from it! For, although in a few places racial differences occur somewhere near the linguistic frontiers, as in Wales and Brittany, they are all the more misleading elsewhere for that reason. Within the narrow confines of this spoken Keltic language are to be found populations characterized by all the extremes of the races of Europe. The dark-haired, round-faced Breton peasant speaking the Kymric branch of the Keltic tongue is, as we shall hope to demonstrate, physically as far removed from the Welshman who uses the same language, as from the tall and blue-eyed Norman neighbor in France who knows nothing of a Keltic speech at all. The Welshman in turn is physically allied to the Irish and distinct from many of the Gaelic-speaking Scotch, although these last two speak even the same subtype of the Keltic language. Such racial affinity as obtains between certain of these people is in utter defiance of the bonds of speech. The Breton should be more at home among his own folk in the high Alps in respect of race, even although he could hold no converse with the Swiss people in their own tongue. If these examples be not enough, turn to other parts of

Europe. The Walloons and the Flemish, component parts of the Belgian nation, are indeed quite distinct in race and in language alike.[4] It is only an accident. For if we turn to Switzerland, seeking for physical differences along the boundary of the French-and German-speaking cantons, they are not to be found.[5] In northern Italy to-day there are considerable communities still bearing the German speech and customs, evidence of the Teutonic invasions of historic times. These people have become so completely absorbed that they are not distinguishable physically from their Italian neighbors. There are indeed spots in Italy where German racial traits survive, but they are quite remote from these islets of Teutonic language.[6]

Nor in eastern Europe is the picture less confusing. The Bulgarian language, spoken by people so outlandish to Europeans that they gave the word "bogie" to our nurses wherewith to frighten children, went first. Now it is the Roumanian speech which, in its turn, is disappearing before the Slavic tongue.[7] Magyar, the language of the Hungarians, spreading toward the east, displaced by German, which is forcing its way in from the northwest, is also on the move. Beneath all this hurry-skurry of speech the racial lines remain as fixed as ever. Language, in short, as a great philologist has put it, "is not a test of race. It is a test of social contact." Waves of language have swept over Europe, leaving its racial foundations as undisturbed as are the sands of the sea during a storm. The linguistic status of the British Isles, above described, shows us one of these waves—the Keltic—which is, to put it somewhat flippantly, now upon its last lap on the shores of the western ocean.

We may discover how slippery speech is upon men's tongues in yet another way—namely, by observing it actually on the move in a physically quiescent population, leaving a trail behind to mark its passage. Language becomes truly sedentary when a distinctive name is given by men to a place of settlement; it may be a clearing in the virgin wilderness or a renaming of a village after a clearing away by conquest of the former possessors. In either case the result is the same. The name, be it Slavic, Keltic, or other, tends to remain as a permanent witness that a people speaking such a tongue once passed that way. A place name of this kind may and often does outlive the spoken language in that locality. It remains as a monument to mark the former confines of the speech, since it can no more migrate than can the houses and barns within the town. Of course, newcomers may adapt the old name to the peculiar pronunciation of their own tongue, but the savor of antiquity gives it a persistent power which is very great. For this reason we find that after every migration of a spoken language there follows a trail of such place names to indicate a former condition. Our maps, both of the British Isles and of Spain, show this phenomenon very clearly. In the one case the Keltic speech has receded before the Teutonic influence, leaving a belt of its peculiar village names behind. In the other the Basque place names, far outside the present limits of the spoken Basque, indicate no less clearly that the speech is on the move toward the north, where no such intermediate zone exists.

Then, after the village names have been replaced by the newcomers, or else become so far mutilated as to lose their identity, there still linger the names of rivers, mountains, bays, headlands, and other natural features of the country. Hallowed by folklore or superstition, their outlandish sounds only serve the more to insure them against disturbance. All over England such names are not uncommon, pointing to a remote past when the Keltic speech was omnipresent. Nay, more, not only from all over the British Isles, but from a large area of the mainland of Europe as well, comes testimony of this kind to a former wide expansion of this Keltic language. Such geographical names represent the third and final stage of the erosion of language prior to its utter disappearance. Nevertheless, as we shall show, the physical features of men outlive even these, so inherent and deep rooted have they become. It is indeed true, as Rhys, himself a linguist, has aptly put it, that "skulls are harder than consonants, and races lurk behind when languages slip away."

It appears that language rests even more lightly upon men than do traditions and folk customs. We find that it disappears first, under pressure, leaving these others along with physical traits perhaps as sole survivors. There are several reasons for this mobility. One is that languages rarely coalesce.[8] They may borrow and mutilate, but they seldom mix if very distinct in type. The superior, or perhaps official, language simply crowds the other out by force. Organization in this case counts for more than numbers. In this way the language of the Isle de France has prevailed over the whole country despite its once limited area, because it had an aggressive dynasty behind it. Language, moreover, requires for its maintenance unanimous consent and not mere majority rule; for, so soon as the majority changes its speech, the minority must acquiesce. Not so with folk tales or fireside customs. People cling to these all the more pertinaciously as they become rare. And still less so with physical traits of race. Many of these last are not apparent to the eye. They are sometimes unsuspected until they have well-nigh disappeared. Men mingle their blood freely. They intermarry, and a mixed type results. Thus racially organization avails nothing against the force of numbers. In linguistic affairs nothing succeeds like success; but in anthropology impetus counts for nothing.

This does not mean that we are justified to measure race by the geographical distribution of arts or customs, for they also migrate in complete independence of physical traits. With the Keltic language spread the use of polished stone implements and possibly the custom of incineration, but this did not entail a new race of men. At times a change of culture appears, accompanied by a new physical type, as when bronze was introduced into Britain, or when the European races brought the use of iron to America. Of course, contact is always implied in such migration, although a few stragglers may readily have been the cause of the spread of the custom. This may not be true in respect to the migration of religions, or in any similar case where determined opposition has to be overcome and where conquest means substitution; but in simple arts of immediate obvious application, copying takes place naturally. The art spreads in direct proportion to its immediate value to the people concerned. No missionaries are needed to introduce firearms among the aborigines. The art speedily outruns race. Moreover, cultures like languages seldom mix as men do. Parts may be accepted here and there, but complete amalgamation seldom results. The main effect of the contact of two distinct cultures is to produce stratification. The common people become the conservators of the old; the upper classes hold to the new. It is a case of folklore and superstition versus progressive ideas. Here, as in respect of language, arts and customs become reliable as a test of race only when found fixed in the soil or in some other way prevented from migration.

Furthermore, let us not attach too much importance to the statements of historical and classical writers in their accounts of migrations and of conquests. We should beware of the travelers' tales of the ancients. Pliny describes a people of Africa with no heads and with eyes and mouth in the breast—a statement which to the anthropologist appears to be open to the suspicion of exaggeration. Even when conquest has undoubtedly taken place, it does not imply a change of physical type in the region affected. We are dealing with great masses of men near the soil to whom it matters little whether the emperor be Macedonian, Roman, or Turk. Till comparatively recent times the peasantry of Europe were as little affected by changes of dynasty as the Chinese people have been touched by the recent war in the East. To them personally, victory or defeat meant little except a change of tax-gatherers.

In this connection it should be borne in mind that conquest often affected but a small area of each country—namely, its richest and most populous portions. The foreigner seldom penetrated the outlying districts. He went, as did the Spaniards in South America, where gold was gathered in the great cities. France, as we know, was affected very unevenly by the Roman conquest. It was not the portion nearest to Rome, but the richest though remote one, which yielded to the Roman rule to the greatest extent. At all events, the Roman colonists in Gaul and Brittany have disappeared, to leave no trace. The Vandals in Africa have left no sign—neither hide nor hair, in a literal sense—nor is there evidence of the long English rule in Aquitaine. The Burgundian kingdom was changed merely in respect to its rulers; and spots in Italy like Benevento, ruled by the Lombards for five hundred years, are to-day precisely like all the region round about them.

The truth is that migrations or conquests to be physically effective must be domestic and not military. Colonization must take place by wholesale, and it must include men, women, and children. The Roman conquests seldom proceeded thus, in sharp contrast to the people of the East, who migrated in hordes, colonizing incidentally on the way. England was not affected by her Roman invasion, nor until the Teutons came by thousands. In anthropology as in jurisprudence, possession is nine points of the law. Everything is on the side, physically speaking, of the native. He has been acclimated, developing peculiarities proper to his surroundings. He is free from the costly work of transporting helpless women and children. The immense majority of his fellows are like him in habits, tastes, and circumstances. The invader, if he remains at all, dilutes his blood by half as soon as he marries, and settles, with the prospect that it will be quartered in the next generation. He can not exterminate the vanquished as savages do, even if he would. Nay, more, it is not to his advantage to do so, for labor is too valuable to sacrifice in that way. Self-interest triumphs over race hatred. He may kill off a score or two of the leading men and call it exterminating a tribe, as the great anthropologist Broca put it, but the probability is that all the women and most of the men remain. In the subsequent process of acclimatization, moreover, his ranks are decimated. He struggles against the combined distrust of most of his neighbors as well as with the migratory instinct which brought him there in the first place. If he excels in intelligence, he may continue to rule, but his line is doomed to extinction unless kept alive by constant re-enforcements. It has been well said that the greatest obstacle to the spread of man is man. One of the objects of our study will be to show, as Dr. Collignon aflirms, that "when a race is well seated in a region, fixed to the soil by agriculture, acclimatized by natural selection, and sufficiently dense, it opposes an enormous resistance to absorption by newcomers, whoever they may be."

Population being thus persistent by reason of its indestructibility, a peculiar province of our study will be to show the relation which has arisen between the geography of a country and the character of its people. Historians have not failed in the past to point out the ways in which the migrations and conquests of nations have been determined by mountain chains and rivers. They have too often been content merely to show that the immediate direction of the movement has been dependent upon topographical features. We endeavor to go a step further in indicating the manner in which the ethnic character of the population has been determined by its environment, entirely apart from political or historical events as such, and as a result of social forces which are still at work. Thus we shall show that the physical character of the population often changes at the line which divides the hills from the plains. The national boundary may run along the crest of the mountain chain, while the ethnic lines skirt its base where the economic character of the country changes. In other cases, the racial may be equally far from the political boundary, since the river bed may delimit the state, while the racial divisions follow the watershed.

Modern political boundaries will, therefore, avail us but little; they are entirely a superficial product; for, as we insist, nationality bears no constant or necessary relation whatever to race. It is an artificial result of political causes to a great extent. From the moment an individual is born into the world, he finds himself exposed to a series of concentric influences which swing in upon him with overwhelming force. The ties of family lie nearest: the bonds and prejudices of caste follow close upon; then comes the circle of party affiliations and of religious denomination. Language encompasses all these about. The element of nationality lying outside of them all is as largely the result of historical and social causes as any of the others, with the sole exception of family perhaps. Race may conceivably cut across all these lines at right angles. It underlies them all. It is, so to speak, the raw material from which each of these social patterns is made up. It may become an agent to determine their intensity and motive, as the nature of the fiber determines the design woven in the stuff. It may proceed in utter independence. Race harmonizes, at all events, less with the bounds of nationality than with any other—certainly less so than with those either of social caste or religious affiliation. That nearly a half of France, while peopled by ardent patriots, is as purely Teutonic racially as the half of Germany itself is a sufficient example of the truth of our assertion. The best illustration of the greater force of religious prejudices to give rise to a distinct physical type is afforded by the Jews. Social ostracism, based upon differences of belief in great measure, has sufficed to keep them truer to a single racial standard, perhaps, than any other people of Europe. Another example of religious isolation, re-enforced by geographical seclusion, may be seen among the followers of the mediæval reformer, Juan Valdés. Persecuted for generations, driven high up into the Alps of northwestern Italy, these people show today a notable difference in physical type from all their neighbors.[9]

Political geography is, for all these reasons, entirely distinct from racial and social geography, as well in its principles as in its results. Many years ago a course was delivered before this Lowell Institute by M. Guyot, the great geographer, subsequently published under the caption The Earth and Man. It created a profound sensation at the time, as it pointed out the intimate relation which exists between geography and history; but it was of necessity extremely vague, and its results were in the main unsatisfactory. Its value lay mainly in its novel point of view. Since this time a completely new science dealing with man has arisen, capable of as great precision as any of the other natural sciences. It has humanized geography, so to speak, even as M. Guyot did in his time and generation; and it has enriched history and sociology in a new and unexpected way.

Historians have of late shown a distinct tendency toward a fuller appreciation of the importance of physical environment in human affairs.[10] The movement is probably at one with the newer conceptions of the pre-potency of social over political factors in the making of history. At all events, geography and history have been drawing nearer to one another under the distinguished leadership of the authors of The American Common-wealth, and of The Norman Conquest of England in the Old World. In America our own Justin Winsor has contributed manfully to the same end. We have now to bring still other elements—anthropology and sociology—into touch with these other two, to form a combination possessed of singular suggestiveness. It affords at once a means for the quantitative measurement of racial migrations and social movements; and it yields a living picture of the population—the raw material—in and through which all history must of necessity work. Studing men as merely physical types of the higher animals, we are able to trace their movements as we do those of the lower species; we may correlate these results with the physical geography and the economic character of the environment; and then, at last, superpose the social phenomena in their geographical distribution. We attempt to discover relations either of cause and effect, or at least of parallelism and similarity due to a common cause which lies back of them all—perhaps in human nature itself. Anthropology, geography, sociology, correlated and combined, such is the effect.

Our study thus overlaps several fields of investigation which have stood quite remote from one another in the past; yet it draws its material from each, and then returns it again endowed with a new and living significance. Some one has rightly said that many great advances in human knowledge have been due to those who effected new combinations of ideas by bringing together results from widely separated sciences. Helmholtz stands as a great modern example, physiologist, mathematician, natural philosopher. Goethe, Spencer, and many more could be cited as well in defense of the same proposition. Science advances by the revelation of new relationships between things. In the present case the hope of perhaps striking a spark, by knocking these divers sciences together, has induced men to collect materials, often in ignorance of the exact use to which they might be ultimately put. To show the results which have already been achieved is the task to which we have to address ourselves.

The observations upon which our conclusions for Europe are to rest, cover some ten or more million individuals, the larger fraction being school children, a goodly proportion, however, consisting of conscripts taken from the soil directly to the recruiting commissions of the various European armies. The labor involved in merely collecting, to say nothing of tabulating, this mass of material is almost superhuman; and we can not too highly praise the scientific zeal which has made possible our comfortable work of comparing this accumulated data. As an example of the difficulties which have been encountered, let me quote from a personal letter from Dr. Ammon, one of the pioneers in this work, who measured thousands of recruits in the Black Forest of Germany. "One naturally," he writes, "is reluctant to undertake a four or six weeks' trip with the commission in winter, with snow a metre deep, living in the meanest inns in the little hamlets, and moving about every two to five days. The official inspectors must not be retarded in their work, as the Ministry of War attaches that condition to their permission to view the recruits. Many of those rejected for service are dismissed by the surgeons at a glance, but I must make measurements on all alike. Only when the doctor stops to make an auscultation or to test the vision do I have a moment's respite. They are sent to my room from the medical inspector at the rate of two hundred in three hours, sometimes two hundred and forty; and on all these men I must make many measurements, while rendering instant decision upon the color of the hair and eyes. The mental effort involved in forming so many separate judgments in such quick succession often brings me near fainting at the close of the session."

Of course, where observations are privately made, to obtain the consent of the owner of the characteristics is the main obstacle to be overcome. To make the subject understand what is wanted is impossible, for it would involve a full discussion of the Keltic question or of the origin of the Aryans, which, after the first one hundred cases, becomes tiresome. The color of the hair and eyes, of course, may be noted in passing, and observers may station themselves on crowded thoroughfares and easily collect a large mass of material. I have myself found profit and entertainment on the Fall River boats in running up some columns from my unsuspecting fellow-passengers. But to make head measurements is another matter. Dr. Beddoe adopted an ingenious device which I will describe in his own words: "Whenever a likely little squad of natives was encountered the two archæologists got up a dispute about the relative size and shape of their own heads, which I was called in to settle with the calipers. The unsuspecting Irishmen usually entered keenly into the debate, and before the little drama had been finished, were eagerly betting on the sizes of their own heads, and begging to have their wagers determined in the same manner."

The figures gathered in this way from the schools and the armies have a peculiar value. They represent all classes of the population, but more especially the peasantry in all the nooks and corners of Europe wherever the long arm of the Polizei Staat reaches. The upper classes are less fully represented oftentimes, since they attend private schools or are better able to evade the military service by money payment or by educational test. This simplifies the matter, since it is the proletariat which alone clearly reflects the influence of race or of environment. They are the ones we wish to study. In this sense the observations upon these populations may aid the sociologist or the historian; for the greatest obstacle, heretofore, to the prosecution of the half-written history of the common people has been the lack of proper raw materials. There is a mine of information here which has barely been opened to view on the surface.

  1. A full discussion of this point is offered in Bulletin de la Société d'Anthropologie, Paris, 1862, p. 264. Vide also Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. v, p. 212; and Mittheilungen der anthropologischen Gesellschaft, Wien, Supp. I, p. viii.
  2. For the Basque language boundary, vide Revue d'Anthropologie, Paris, series 1, iv, p. 1. The Catalan boundary in France is mapped in Revue mensuelle de l'École d'Anthropologie, Paris, vol. i, p. 143; Encyelopædia Britannica, vol. xxii, p. 350, gives details for Spain. The dialect boundary of the Langue d'Oc is traced geographically in Revue mensuelle, etc., i, p. 219; vide also Bulletin de la Société d'Anthropologie, 1879, p. 68.
  3. For exact details and maps of the spoken languages, vide Ravenstein in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, London, vol. xlii, p. 579, for Great Britain. The limits in France are mapped in Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie, Paris, series i, iii, pp. 147 seq. The place names are mapped in Canon Taylor's Names and Places. Also Bull. Soc., 1878, p. 236.
  4. Annales de Demographie, iv, p. 224; or more fully, with maps by the author, in Publications of the American Statistical Association, v, p. 28.
  5. The French and German portions of Switzerland are shown in Forschungen zur Deutschen Landes- und Volkskunde, viii, No. 5, 1894; and Rundschau für Geographic und Statistik, xiii, p. 337, appendix map.
  6. Map in Petermann's Geographische Mittheilungen, 1877, plate 17; vide also Globus, lxvi, p. 165; and Journal of the Anthropological Institute, ii, p. 108.
  7. Revue de Geographie, xxxvii, p. 321. Perhaps the best compilation of references to ethnological maps extant, bringing them down to 1885, is given by Dr. Andrée in Mittheilungen des Vereins für Erdkunde zu Leipzig, 1885, pp. 173 seq.; less fully to 1879 in Archiv für Anthropologie, xi, p. 454. The editor confesses that nearly all of them are indeed not ethnological, but merely "speech" maps.
  8. Vide interesting discussion of this point in detail in A.H. Keane, Ethnology, pp. 198 seq.
  9. Archivio per l'Antropolgia, xx, pp. 61 et seq.; also R. Livi, Anthropometria militaire, p. 135.
  10. For a full discussion of this topic, reference may be made to a paper by the author in he Political Science Quarterly, vol. x, p. 636.