The same period of mutation may well have given rise also to one or more brunet types, some of which may have survived. But if any new brunet type has come up within a period so recent as this implies, the fact has not been noted or surmised hitherto—unless the brunet races spoken for by Deniker are to be accepted as typically distinct and referred to such an origin. The evidence for the brunet stocks has not been canvassed with a question of this kind in view. These stocks have not been subject of such eager controversy as the dolicho-blond, and the attention given them has been correspondingly less. The case of the blond is unique in respect of the attention spent on questions of its derivation and prehistory, and it is also singular in respect of the facility with which it can be isolated for the purposes of such an inquiry. This large and persistent attention, from all sorts of ethnologists, has brought the evidence bearing on the dolicho-blond into such shape as to permit more confident generalisations regarding that race than any other.
In any case the number of mutant individuals, whether of one or of several specific types, will have been very few as compared with the numbers of the parent stock from which they diverged, even if they may have been somewhat numerous as counted absolutely, and the survivors whose offspring produced a permanent effect on the European peoples will have been fewer still. It results that these surviving mutants will not have been isolated from the parent stock, and so could not breed in isolation, but must forthwith be crossed on the parent stock and could therefore yield none but hybrid offspring. From the outset, therefore, the community or communities in which the blond mutants were propagated would be made up of a mixture of blond and brunet, with the brunet greatly preponderating. It may be added that in all probability there were also present in this community from the start one or more minor brunet elements besides the predominant Mediterranean, and that at least shortly after the close of the glacial period the new brachycephalic brunet (Alpine) race comes into the case; so that the chances favor an early and persistent crossing of the dolicho-blond with more than one brunet type, and hence they favor complications and confusion of types from the start. It follows that, in point of pedigree, according to this view there neither is nor ever has been a pure-bred dolicho-blond individual since the putative original mutant with which the type came in. But under the Mendelian rule of hybrids it is none the less to be expected that, in the course of time and of climatically selective breeding, individuals (perhaps in appreciable numbers) will have come up from time to time showing the type characters unmixed and unweakened, and effectively pure-bred in point of heredity. Indeed, such individuals, effectively pure-bred or tending to the establishment of a pure line, will probably have emerged somewhat frequently under conditions favorable to the pure type. The selective action of the conditions of life in the habitat most favorable to the propagation of the dolicho-blond has worked in a rough and uncertain way toward the establishment, in parts of the Baltic and North Sea region, of communities made up prevailingly of blonds. Yet none of these communities most favorably placed for a selective breeding in the direction of a pure dolicho-blond population have gone far enough in that direction to allow it safely to be said that the composite population of any such given locality is more than half blond.
Placed as it is in a community of nations made up of a hybrid mixture of several racial stocks there is probably no way at present of reaching a convincing demonstration of the typical originality of this dolicho-blond mutant, as contrasted with the other blond types with which it is associated in the European population; but certain general considerations go decidedly, perhaps decisively, to enforce such a view: (a) This type shows such a pervasive resemblance to a single one of the known older and more widely distributed types of man (the Mediterranean) as to suggest descent by mutation from this one rather than derivation by crossing of any two or more known types. The like can not be said of the other blond types, all and several of which may plausibly be explained as hybrids of known types. They have the appearance of blends, or rather of biometrical compromises, between two or more existing varieties of man. Whereas it does not seem feasible to explain the dolicho-blond as such a blend or compromise between any known racial types. (b) The dolicho-blond occurs, in a way, centrally to the other blond types, giving them a suggestive look of being ramifications of the blond stock, by hybridisation, into regions not wholly suited to the typical blond. The like can scarcely be said for any of the other European types or races. The most plausible exception would be Deniker's East-European or Oriental race, Beddoe's Saxon, which stands in a somewhat analogous spacial relation to the other blond types. But this brachycephalic blond is not subject to the same sharp climatic limitations that hedge about the dolicho-blond; it occurs apparently with equally secure viability within the littoral home area of the dolicho-blond and in continental situations where conditions of altitude and genial climate would bar the latter from permanent settlement. The ancient and conventionally accepted center of diffusion of blondness in Europe lies within the seaboard region bordering on the south Baltic, the North Sea and the narrow waters of the Scandinavian peninsulas. Probably, if this broad central area of diffusion were to be narrowed down to a particular spot, the consensus of opinion as to where the narrower area of characteristic blondness is to be looked for, would converge on the lands immediately about the narrow Scandinavian waters. This would seem to hold true for historic and for prehistoric times alike. This region is at the same time, by common consent, the peculiar home of the dolicho-blond, rather than of any other blond type. (c) The well known but little discussed climatic limitation of the blond race applies particularly to the dolicho-blond, and only in a pronouncedly slighter degree to the other blond types. The dolicho-blond is subject to a strict regional limitation, the other blond types to a much less definite and wider limitation of the same kind. Hence these others are distributed somewhat widely, over regions often remote and climatically different from the home area of the dolicho-blond, giving them the appearance of being dispersed outward from this home area as hybrid extensions of the central and typical blond stock. A further and equally characteristic feature of this selective localisation of the dolicho-blond race is the fact that while this race does not succeed permanently outside the seaboard region of the south Baltic and North Sea, there is no similar selective bar against other races intruding into this region. Although the dolicho-blond perhaps succeeds better within its home area than any other competing stock or type, yet several other types of man succeed so well within the same region as to hold it, and apparently always to have held it, in joint tenancy with the dolicho-blond.
A close relationship, amounting to varietal identity, of the Kabyle with the dolicho-blond has been spoken for by Keane and by other ethnologists. But the very different climatic tolerance of the two races should put such an identity out of the question. The Kabyle lives and thrives best, where his permanent home area has always been, in a high and dry country, sufficiently remote from the sea to make it a continental rather than a littoral habitat. The dolicho-blond, according to all available evidence, can live in the long run only in a seaboard habitat, damp and cool, at a high latitude and low altitude. There is no known instance of this race having gone out from its home area on the northern seaboard into such a region as that inhabited by the Kabyle and having survived for an appreciable number of generations. That this type of man should have come from Mauritania, where it could apparently not live under the conditions known to have prevailed there in the recent or the remoter past, would seem to be a biologic impossibility. Hitherto, when the dolicho-blond has migrated into such or a similar habitat it has not adapted itself to the new climatic requirements but has presently disappeared off the face of the land. Indeed, the experiment has been tried in Mauritanian territory. If the Kabyle blond is to be correlated with those of Europe, it will in all probability have to be assigned an independent origin, to be derived from an earlier mutation of the same Mediterranean stock to which the dolicho-blond is to be traced.
Questions of race in Europe are greatly obscured by the prevalence of hybrid types having more or less fixity and being more or less distinctly localised. The existing European peoples are hybrid mixtures of two or more racial stocks. The further fact is sufficiently obvious, though it has received less critical attention than might be, that these several hybrid populations have in the course of time given rise to a number of distinct national and local types, differing characteristically from one another and having acquired a degree of permanence, such as to simulate racial characters and show well marked national and local traits in point of physiognomy and temperament. Presumably, these national and local types of physique and temperament are hybrid types that have been selectively bred into these characteristic forms in adaptation to the peculiar circumstances of environment and culture under which each particular local population is required to live, and that have been so fixed (provisionally) by selective breeding of the hybrid material subject to such locally uniform conditions—except so far as the local characters in question are of the nature of habits and are themselves therefore to be classed as an institutional element rather than as characteristics of race.
It is evident that under the Mendelian law of hybridisation the range of favorable, or viable, variations in any hybrid population must be very large—much larger than the range of fluctuating (non-typical) variations obtainable under any circumstances in a pure-bred race. It also follows from these same laws of hybridisation that by virtue of the mutual exclusiveness of allelomorphic characters or groups of characters it is possible selectively to obtain an effectually "pure line" of hybrids combining characters drawn from each of the two or more parent stocks engaged, and that such a composite pure line may selectively be brought to a provisional fixity[7] in any such hybrid population. And under conditions favorable to a type endowed with any given hybrid combination of characters so worked out the given hybrid type (composite pure line) may function in the racial mixture in which it is so placed very much as an actual racial type would behave under analogous circumstances; so that, e.g., under continued intercrossing such a hybrid population would tend cumulatively to breed true to this provisionally stable hybrid type, rather than to the actual racial type represented by any one of the parent stocks of which the hybrid population is ultimately made up, unless the local conditions should selectively favor one or another of these ultimate racial types. Evidently, too, the number of such provisionally stable composite pure lines that may be drawn from any hybrid mixture of two or more parent stocks must be very considerable—indeed virtually unlimited; so that on this ground there should be room for any conceivable number of provisionally stable national or local types of physique and temperament, limited only by the number of characteristically distinguishable local environments or situations that might each selectively act to characterise and establish a locally characteristic composite pure line; each answering to the selective exigencies of the habitat and cultural environment in which it is placed, and each responding to these exigencies in much the same fashion as would an actual racial type—provided only that this provisionally stable composite pure line is not crossed on pure-bred individuals of either of the parent stocks from which it is drawn, pure-bred in respect of the allelomorphic characters which give the hybrid type its typical traits.
When the hybrid type is so crossed back on one or other of its parent stocks it should be expected to break down; but in so slow-breeding a species as man, with so large a complement of unit characters (some 4000 it has been estimated), it will be difficult to decide empirically which of the two lines—the hybrid or the parent stock—proves itself in the offspring effectively to be a racial type; that is to say, which of the two (or more) proves to be an ultimately stable type arisen by a Mendelian mutation, and which is a provisionally stable composite pure line selectively derived from a cross. The inquiry at this point, therefore, will apparently have to content itself with arguments of probability drawn from the varying behavior of the existing hybrid types under diverse conditions of life.
Such general consideration of the behavior of the blond types of Europe, other than the dolicho-blond, and more particularly consideration of their viability under divergent climatic conditions, should apparently incline to the view that they are hybrid types, of the nature of provisionally stable composite pure lines.
So far, therefore, as the evidence has yet been canvassed, it seems probable on the whole that the dolicho-blond is the only survivor from among the several mutants that may have arisen out of this presumed mutating period; that the other existing blond types, as well as certain brunets, are derivatives of the hybrid offspring of the dolicho-blond crossed on the parent Mediterranean stock or on other brunet stocks with which the race has been in contact early or late; and that several of these hybrid lines have in the course of time selectively been established as provisionally stable types (composite pure lines), breakable only by a fresh cross with one or other of the parent types from which the hybrid line sprang, according to the Mendelian rule.[8]
All these considerations may not be convincing, but they are at least suggestive to the effect that if originality is to be claimed for any one of the blond types or stocks it can best be claimed for the dolicho-blond, while the other blond types may better be accounted for as the outcome of the crossing of this stock on one or another of the brunet stocks of Europe.