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They may thence be called the MELANOCHROI. Such people are found in the British Islands, in Western and Southern Gaul, in Spain, in Italy south of the Po, in parts of Greece, in Syria and Arabia, stretching as far northward and eastward as the Caucasus and Persia. They are the chief inhabitants of Africa north of the Sahara, and, like the Xanthochroi, they end in the Canary Islands.
LEIOTRICHI. ULOTRICHI. / \ / \ Dolichocephali. Brachycephali. Dolichocephali. Brachycephali. Leucous. .... Xanthochroi .... Leucomelanous. .... Melanochroi .... Xanthomelanous. Esquimaux. Mongolians. Bushmen. Amphinesians. Americans. Melanous. Australians. Negroes.
The Xanthochroi, who thus came into contact with the Western Melanochroi, spoke a Celtic language; and that Celtic language, whether Cymric or Gaelic, spread over the Melanochroi far beyond the limits of intermixture of blood, supplanting Euskarian, just as English and French, have supplanted Celtic.
The conclusions which I draw from these and other facts are That the Melanochroi and the Xanthochroi are two separate races in the biological sense of the word race; That they have had the same general distribution as at present from the earliest times of which any record exists on the continent of Europe; That the population of the British Islands is derived from them, and from them only.
The Melanochroi, on the other hand, may be represented as a broad band stretching from Ireland to Hindostan; while the Xanthochroic area lies between the two, thins out, so to speak, at either end, and mingles, at its margins, with both its neighbours. Such is a brief and summary statement of what I believe to be the chief facts relating to the physical ethnology of the people of Britain.
V. The Celtic and the Teutonic dialects are members of the same great Aryan family of languages; but there is evidence to show that a non-Aryan language was at one time spoken over a large extent of the area occupied by Melanochroi in Europe.
On the whole, however, it is wonderful how little change has been effected by these mutual invasions and intermixtures. As at the present time, so at the dawn of history, the Melanochroi fringed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; the Xanthochroi occupied most of Central and Eastern Europe, and much of Western and Central Asia; while Mongolians held the extreme east of the Old World.
Such seem to me to be the main facts respecting the ethnology of the British islands and of Western Europe, which may be said to be fairly established. The Xanthochroi, spreading over the great Eurasiatic plains westward, and speaking Aryan dialects, gradually invaded the territories of the Melanochroi.
IV. The Xanthochroi and the Melanochroi of Britain are, speaking broadly, distributed, at present, as they were in the time of Tacitus; and their representatives on the continent of Europe have the same general distribution as at the earliest period of which we have any record.
To these are added a fifth variety, the Melanochroi, to which belong a part of the Celts, the Spaniards, Greeks, Arabs, etc. Of the various methods of race-division, A. van Humboldt says: "We fail to recognize any typical sharpness of definition, or any general or well-established principle, in the division of these groups.
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