Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

In them the stature is medium, the form symmetrical, hair and eyes are dark but rarely black, the complexion dark and sallow, the face oval, and the skull long, the length being in the posterior (occipital) region. Although the last mentioned is an important distinction between the Celtic and the Euskaric skull, there is unquestionably a closer resemblance physically between the Celts and Basques, who speak totally diverse tongues, than between the Celts and Cymri, whose tongue was the same.

In these four typical groups from the extreme west of Europe we find sharp contrasts within limited areas, among peoples some of whom are unquestionably consanguine. Two of the groups, the Teutonic and Cymric, belong in color and hair and stature to the blonde type, but differ profoundly in shape of skull and facial bones; the two others belong to the brunette type, but differ equally in osseous character. In general physical traits the Celtic differs less from the Euskaric than from the Cymric type, as was recognized by the historian Tacitus.

These facts bring out an ethnic principle of importance—the variability of traits within the racial limits—and this becomes more marked as the race is higher in the scale of organic development. No race remains closer to its type than the Austafrican, none departs from it so constantly as the Eurafrican. Wherever we find the unmixed white race we find its blonde and brunette varieties, its prognathic and orthognathic jaws, its long-skulled and broad-skulled heads.[50] To establish genealogic schemes exclusively upon these differences, as has been the work of so many living anthropologists, is to build houses of cards.

These contrasts are presented to us daily. The researches of Virchow, De Candolle, Kollmann, and many others, prove that in the same city, in the same family, the children to-day are born brunettes or blondes, dark or light eyed, to some degree broad or narrow skulled, with but partial reference to their parents’ peculiarities. The aberrant types are usually about twenty per cent. of the whole. It seems generally to have been so in the unmixed white race wherever located.

All such variations, however, remain strictly within the racial lines, and are not approximations to other races. Each race retains to-day the characteristics of its earliest representatives, so far as we know them.

Primal Home of the White Race.—Where should we look for these earliest representatives, for the primal home of the Eurafrican race? The usual answer has been “in Asia,” but now that answer is rejected by all the younger and most earnest ethnologists.

A steady stream of information has of late been contributed by the sciences of linguistics, palæontology, pre-historic archæology and racial anatomy, sufficient to convince even the skeptical that not Asia, but the western water-shed of the Eastern Continent, was the area of characterization which developed this race with its marked physical traits and singular mental endowments. In the previous lecture I have shown you that man himself probably came into being as such within the limits of that region which I have described as Eurafrica; and as its conditions were such as to foster his transformation from some inferior primate, so they continued, though profoundly altered, to favor his growth, as they still do continue to-day. It is by no mere accident or result of political manœuvres that western Europe has for two thousand years produced the mightiest nations and greatest minds of the earth.

The discussion of the precise locality where in Europe the primitive man developed into the white race has occupied many learned pens in the last score of years. But by nearly all of them the discussion has been limited to the birthplace of merely the Aryan linguistic stock—an unfortunate narrowness of view, which has prevented a comprehensive grasp of the question at issue.[51]

The Aryan peoples present by no means the only, nor yet the purest types of the white race. I have seen quite as noble blondes among the Kabyles of the Djurjura as in Denmark, quite as handsome brunettes among the Basques of the Pyrenees as among the Celts of France or the Italians. A broad construction of the question must include all these, and in this spirit I approach it.

We must search for the first abode, the primitive “area of characterization” of the white race: