“The successful commercial men, who have given the Welsh their extraordinarily prominent place in British trade (shipping firms, for example), usually belong to types 2 or 4” [Nordic and Nordic-Alpine, Beaker Maker], “rather than to 1, as also do the great majority of Welsh members of Parliament, though there are exceptions of the first importance.
“The Nordic type is marked by ingenuity and enterprise in striking out new lines. Type 2(c)” [Beaker Maker] “in Wales is remarkable for governmental ability of the administrative kind as well as for independence of thought and critical power.”
The following remarks are taken from Beddoe, 4, p. 142: “In opposition to the current opinion it would seem that the Welsh rise most in commerce, the Scotch coming after them and the Irish nowhere. The people of Welsh descent and name hold their own fairly in science; the Scotch do more, the Irish less. But when one looks to the attainment of military or political distinction, the case is altered. Here the Scotchmen, and especially the Highlanders bear away the palm; the Irish retrieve their position and the Welsh are little heard of.”
See also p. 10 of Beddoe’s Races of Britain, and Hector McLean in vol. IV, pp. 218 seq. of the Anthropological Review and elsewhere. The following quotation from Hall’s Ancient History of the Near East is interesting:
“Knowing what we do of the psychological peculiarities of the different races of mankind, it is perhaps not an illegitimate speculation to wonder whence the Greeks inherited this sense of proportion in their whole mental outlook. The feeling of Hellenes for art in general was surely inherited from their forebears on the Ægean, not the Indo-European side.[[7]] The feeling for naturalistic art, for truth of representation, may have come from the Ægeans, but the equally characteristic love of the crude and bizarre was not inherited: the sense of proportion inhibited it. In fact, we may ascribe this sense to the Aryan element in the Hellenic brain, to which must also be attributed the Greek political sense, the idea of the rights of the folk and of the individual in it.[[8]] The Mediterranean possessed the artistic sense without the sense of proportion: the Aryan had little artistic sense but had the sense of proportion and justice, and with it the political sense. The result of the fusion of the two races we see in the true canon of taste and beauty in all things that had become the ideal of the Greeks,[[9]] and was through them to become the ideal of mankind.”
[7]. “We have only to look around and seek, vainly, for any self-developed artistic feeling among the pure Indo-Europeans. The Kassites had none and blighted that of Babylonia for centuries: the Persians had none and merely adopted that of Assyria: the Goths and Vandals had none: the Celts and Teutons have throughout the centuries derived theirs from the Mediterranean region.”
[8]. The predominance of the Aryan element in Greek political ideas is obvious. It is not probable that the old Ægean had any more definite political ideas than had his relative the Egyptian.
[9]. “In matters of political and ordinary justice between man and man they fell short of their ideal often enough, but they had the reasonable ideal: the barbarians had none. The Egyptians were an imaginative race, but their imagination was untrammelled by the sense of proportion: their only thinker with reasonable and logical ideas, Akhenaten, soon became as mad a fanatic as any unreasonable Nitrian monk or Arab Mahdi. Ordinarily speaking, Egyptian and Semitic ideals were purely religious, and so, to the Greek mind, beyond the domain of reason. The Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phœnicians cannot be said ever to have possessed any ideals of any kind.”
229 : 22. Fleure and James, p. 146, say: “In the folk tales, it is true, the people are called fairies but colouring is mentioned only in one case—that is of a trader from the sea who is said to be fair; i. e., fair hair is treated as something worthy of special mention. The fairy children (changelings) are always described in such a way as to suggest that they were dark, and that they were the children of the Upland-folk of our hypothesis—i. e., mostly of Mediterranean race. In the romances the princes and princesses are said to be fair, as though that were exceptional. Our friend, Mr. J. H. Shaxby, draws our attention to the probability that the word fair in ‘fair’ or ‘fair-folk’ does not refer to physical traits, but is an adulatory term such as men so generally use in describing beings about whom their superstitions gather.”
230 : 5. Pope Gregory, about 578 A. D.