(a) It is held, on the one hand, that there is but a single blond race, type or stock (Keane, Lapouge, Sergi), and on the other hand that there are several such races or types, more or less distinct but presumably related (Deniker, Beddoe, and other, especially British, ethnologists). (b) There is no good body of evidence going to establish a great antiquity for the blond stock, and there are indications, though perhaps inconclusive, that the blond strain, including all the blond types, is of relatively late date—unless a Berber (Kabyle) blond race is to be accepted in a more unequivocal manner than hitherto. (c) Neither is there anything like convincing evidence that this blond strain has come from outside of Europe—except, again, for the equivocal Kabyle—or that any blond race has ever been widely or permanently distributed outside of its present European habitat, (d) The blond race is not found unmixed. In point of pedigree all individuals showing the blond traits are hybrids, and the greater number of them show their mixed blood in their physical traits. (e) There is no community, large or small, made up exclusively of blonds, or nearly so, and there is no good evidence available that such an all-blond or virtually all-blond community ever has existed, either in historic or prehistoric times. The race appears never to have lived in isolation. (f) It occurs in several (perhaps hybrid) variants—unless these variants are to be taken (with Deniker) as several distinct races, (g) Counting the dolicho-blond as the original type of the race, its nearest apparent relative among the races of mankind is the Mediterranean (of Sergi), at least in point of physical traits. At the same time the blond race, or at least the dolicho-blond type, has never since neolithic times, so far as known, extensively and permanently lived in contact with the Mediterranean. (h) The various (national) ramifications of the blond stock—or rather the various racial mixtures into which an appreciable blond element enters—are all, and to all appearance have always been, of Aryan ("Indo-European," "Indo-Germanic") speech—with the equivocal exception of the Kabyle. (i) Yet far the greater number and variety (national and linguistic) of men who use the Aryan speech are not prevailingly blond, or even appreciably mixed with blond. (j) The blond race, or the peoples with an appreciable blond admixture, and particularly the communities in which the dolicho-blond element prevails, show little or none of the peculiarly Aryan institutions—understanding by that phrase not the known institutions of the ancient Germanic peoples, but that range of institutions said by competent philologists to be reflected in the primitive Aryan speech. (k) These considerations raise the presumption that the blond race was not originally of Aryan speech or of Aryan culture, and they also suggest (l) that the Mediterranean, the nearest apparent relative of the dolicho-blond, was likewise not originally Aryan.
Accepting the mutation theory, then, for the purpose in hand, and leaving any questions of Aryanism on one side for the present, a canvass of the situation so outlined may be offered in such bold, crude and summary terms as should be admissible in an analysis which aims to be tentative and provisional only. It may be conceived that the dolichocephalic blond originated as a mutant of the Mediterranean type (which it greatly resembles in its scheme of biometric measurements[3]) probably some time after that race had effected a permanent lodgment on the continent of Europe. The Mediterranean stock may be held (Sergi and Keane) to have come into Europe from Africa,[4] whatever its remoter derivation may have been. It is, of course, not impossible that the mutation which gave rise to the dolicho-blond may have occurred before the parent stock left Africa, or rather before it was shut out of Africa by the submergence of the land connection across Sicily, but the probabilities seem to be against such a view. The conditions would appear to have been less favorable to a mutation of this kind in the African habitat of the parent stock than in Europe, and less favorable in Europe during earlier quaternary time than toward the close of the glacial period.
The causes which give rise to a variation of type have always been sufficiently obscure, whether the origin of species be conceived after the Darwinian or the Mendelian fashion, and the mutation theories have hitherto afforded little light on that question. Yet the Mendelian postulate that the type is stable except for such a mutation as shall establish a new type raises at least the presumption that such a mutation will take place only under exceptional circumstances, that is to say, under circumstances so substantially different from what the type is best adapted to as to subject it to some degree of physiological strain. It is to be presumed that no mutation will supervene so long as the conditions of life do not vary materially from what they have been during the previous uneventful life-history of the type. Such is the presumption apparently involved in the theory and such is also the suggestion afforded by the few experimental cases of observed mutation, as, e.g., those studied by De Vries.
A considerable climatic change, such as would seriously alter the conditions of life either directly or through its effect on the food supply, might be conceived to bring on a mutating state in the race; or the like effect might be induced by a profound cultural change, particularly any such change in the industrial arts as would radically affect the material conditions of life. These considerations, mainly speculative it is true, suggest that the dolicho-blond mutant could presumably have emerged only at a time when the parent stock was exposed to notably novel conditions of life, such as would be presumed (with De Vries) to tend to throw the stock into a specifically unstable (mutating) state; at the same time these novel conditions of life must also have been specifically of such a nature as to favor the survival and multiplication of this particular human type. The climatic tolerance of the dolicho-blond, e.g., is known to be exceptionally narrow. Now, it is not known, indeed there is no reason to presume, that the Mediterranean race was exposed to such variations of climate or of culture before it entered Europe as might be expected to induce a mutating state in the stock, and at the same time a mutant gifted with the peculiar climatic intolerance of the dolicho-blond would scarcely have survived under the conditions offered by northern Africa in late quaternary time. But the required conditions are had later on in Europe, after the Mediterranean was securely at home in that continent.
The whole episode may be conceived to have run off somewhat in the following manner. The Mediterranean race is held to have entered Europe in force during quaternary time, presumably after the quaternary period was well advanced, most likely during the last genial, interglacial period. This race then brought the neolithic culture, but without the domestic animals (or plants?) that are a characteristic feature of the later neolithic age, and it encountered at least the remnants of an older, palaeolithic population. This older European population was made up of several racial stocks, some of which still persist as obscure and minor elements in the later peoples of Europe. The (geologic) date to be assigned this intrusion of the Mediterranean race into Europe is of course not, and can perhaps never be, determined with any degree of nicety or confidence. But there is a probability that it coincides with the recession of the ice-sheet, following one or another of the severer periods of glaciations, that occurred before the submergence of the land connection between Europe and Africa, over Gibraltar, Sicily, and perhaps Crete. How late in quaternary time the final submergence of the Mediterranean basin occurred is still a matter of surmise; the intrusion of the Mediterranean race into Europe appears, on archaeological evidence, to have occurred in late quaternary time, and in the end this archaeological evidence may help to decide the geologic date of the severance of Europe from Africa.
The Mediterranean race seems to have spread easily over the habitable surface of Europe and shortly to have grown numerous and taken rank as the chief racial element in the neolithic population; which argues that no very considerable older population occupied the European continent at the time of the Mediterranean invasion; which in turn implies that the fairly large (Magdalenian) population of the close of the palaeolithic age was in great part destroyed or expelled by the climatic changes that coincided with or immediately preceded the advent of the Mediterranean race. The known characteristics of the Magdalenian culture indicate a technology, a situation and perhaps a race, somewhat closely paralleled by the Eskimo;[5] which argues that the climatic situation before which this Magdalenian race and culture gave way would have been that of a genial interglacial period rather than a period of glaciation.
During this genial (perhaps sub-tropical) inter-glacial period immediately preceding the last great glaciation the Magdalenian stock would presumably find Europe climatically untenable, judging by analogy with the Eskimo; whereas the Mediterranean stock should have found it an eminently favorable habitat, for this race has always succeeded best in a warm-temperate climate. Both the extensive northward range of the early neolithic (Mediterranean) settlements and the total disappearance of the Magdalenian culture from the European continent point to a climatic situation in Europe more favorable to the former race and more unwholesome for the latter than the conditions known to have prevailed at any time since the last interglacial period, especially in the higher latitudes. The indications would seem to be that the whole of Europe, even the Baltic and Arctic seaboards, became climatically so fully impossible for the Magdalenian race during this interglacial period as to result in its extinction or definitive expulsion; for when, in recent times, climatically suitable conditions return, on the Arctic seaboard, the culture which takes the place that should have been occupied by the Magdalenian is the Finnic (Lapp)—a culture unrelated to the Magdalenian either in race or technology, although of much the same cultural level and dealing with a material environment of much the same character. And this genial interval that was fatal to the Magdalenian was, by just so much, favorable to the Mediterranean race.
But glacial conditions presently returned, though with less severity than the next preceding glacial period; and roughly coincident with the close of the genial interval in Europe the land connection with Africa was cut off by submergence, shutting off retreat to the south. How far communication with Asia may have been interrupted during the subsequent cold period, by the local glaciation of the Caucasus, Elburz and Armenian highlands, is for the present apparently not to be determined, although it is to be presumed that the outlet to the east would at least be seriously obstructed during the glaciation. There would then be left available for occupation, mainly by the Mediterranean race, central and southern Europe together with the islands, notably Sicily and Crete, left over as remnants of the earlier continuous land between Europe and Africa. The southern extensions of the mainland, and more particularly the islands, would still afford a favorable place for the Mediterranean race and its cultural growth. So that the early phases of the great Cretan (Aegean) civilisation are presumably to be assigned to this period that is covered by the last advance of the ice in northern Europe. But the greater portion of the land area so left accessible to the Mediterranean race, in central or even in southern Europe, would have been under glacial or sub-glacial climatic conditions. For this race, essentially native to a warm climate, this situation on the European mainland would be sufficiently novel and trying, particularly throughout that ice-fringed range of country where they would be exposed to such cold and damp as this race has never easily tolerated.
The situation so outlined would afford such a condition of physiological strain as might be conceived to throw the stock into a specifically unstable state and so bring on a phase of mutation. At the same time this situation, climatic and technological, would be notably favorable to the survival and propagation of a type gifted with all the peculiar capacities and limitations of the dolicho-blond; so that any mutant showing the traits characteristic of that type would then have had an eminently favorable chance of survival. Indeed, it is doubtful, in the present state of the available evidence, whether such a type of man could have survived in Europe from or over any period of quaternary time prior to the last period of glaciation. The last preceding interglacial period appears to have been of a sufficiently genial (perhaps sub-tropical) character throughout Europe to have definitively eliminated the Magdalenian race and culture, and a variation of climate in the genial sense sufficiently pronounced to make Europe absolutely untenable for the Magdalenian—presumed to be something of a counterpart to the Eskimo both in race and culture—should probably have reached the limit of tolerance for the dolicho-blond as well. The latter is doubtless not as intolerant of a genial—warm-temperate—climate as the former, but the dolicho-blond after all stands much nearer to the Eskimo in this matter of climatic tolerance than to either of the two chief European stocks with which it is associated. Apparently no racial stock with a climatic tolerance approximately like that of the Eskimo, the Magdalenian, or the current races of the Arctic seaboard, survived over the last inter-glacial period; and if the dolicho-blond is conceived to have lived through that period it would appear to have been by a precariously narrow margin. So that, on one ground and another, the mutation out of which the dolicho-blond has arisen is presumably to be assigned to the latest period of glaciation in Europe, and with some probability to the time when the latest glaciation was at its maximum, and to the region where glacial and seaboard influences combined to give that racial type a differential advantage over all others.
This dolicho-blond mutation may, of course, have occurred only once, in a single individual, but it should seem more probable, in the light of De Vries' experiments, that the mutation will have been repeated in the same specific form in several individuals in the same general locality and in the same general period of time. Indeed, it would seem highly probable that several typically distinct mutations will have occurred, repeatedly, at roughly the same period and in the same region, giving rise to several new types, some of which, including the dolicho-blond, will have survived. Many, presumably the greater number, of these mutant types will have disappeared, selectively, being unfit to survive under those sub-glacial seaboard conditions that were eminently favorable to the dolicho-blond; while other mutants arising out of the same mutating period and adapted to climatic conditions of a more continental character, suitable to more of a continental habitat, less humid, at a higher altitude and with a wider seasonal variation of temperature, may have survived in the regions farther inland, particularly eastward of the selectively defined habitat of the dolicho-blond. These latter may have given rise to several blond races, such as are spoken for by Deniker[6] and certain British ethnologists.