This is the section of our species which is the best known, and which has been the earliest described. Preeminently lying within the department of the historian and archæologist, the natural historical questions connected with it, are those of the minute rather than the systematic ethnographist.
Thus—the information, which would be so valuable in Africa or America, as to the general relations of a particular population, is useless here. All such facts are known; and in dealing with areas like Britain, or Italy, we ask—not to what great primary class the Englishman or the Italian belongs, but the subtler questions as to the differentiæ of their mental and physical characteristics, or the amount of foreign intermixture which in one case traverses the original Saxon, and in the other the primitive Roman stock—each stock itself being a complex product.
Ethnology of this sort has its proper exposition in a series of monographs, rather than in a work like the present.
So thoroughly are the Iapetidæ, populations who have encroached upon the frontiers of others rather than admitted encroachments on their own, that, with the exception of the Arab dominion in Spain, which has not, and the Turk and Majiar in Rumelia and Hungary, which have lasted till our own times, there is no instance of their permanent displacement by either Mongolidæ or Atlantidæ of any sort.
Within their own pale, the Celts were the encroaching family of the oldest, the Romans of the next oldest, and the Anglo-Saxons and Slavonians of the recent periods of history.
A.
OCCIDENTAL IAPETIDÆ.
Languages.—Separated from the common mother-tongue subsequent to the evolution of the persons of verbs, but anterior to the evolution of the cases of nouns. Evidently agglutinate.
Here, as with the Atlantidæ, we begin with an extreme, rather than a transitional division of the stock.