176 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920
posed former distribution of Lapps in Finland. The somatic division of the treatise includes observations and measurements on ninety-two living subjects leading to the recognition of two essen- tially different race elements as having entered into the Finnish population proper. Approximately ninety skulls were also obtained. For eighty of these he calculated the cephalic index merely while thirty of them were subjected to a more complete series of measure- ments.
The next work, "Ancient Swedish Crania" (Swedish ed. 1899, German 1900), is a well rounded, sumptuously illustrated report on somewhat more than one hundred skulls, fairly evenly distributed over the Neolithic, the Bronze, and the Iron ages. The results prove that the population of Sweden from the earliest times has been overwhelmingly dolicocephalic but that all along there has been present a slowly increasing admixture of brachycephalics, the exact origin of which is uncertain. The report proper is preceded by a valuable review of the general investigation of Europe's past and present racial characteristics.
The last important contribution, a joint work entitled, "Swedish Anthropology" (German ed., 1902), is a statistical study of army recruits. It was a labor of love, done with governmental sanction but at private expense. The investigation covers measurements and observations on the army contingents for 1897 and 98, in all about 45,000 subjects of the age of twenty-one. The general results show that the so-called pure Nordic type tall, dolicoce- phalic, light hair and blue eyes which constitutes more than ten percent of the entire population, is numerically strongest in what may be roughly designated as the interior central section of Sweden and that it becomes rarer towards the coast and also northwards and southwards owing to intermixture of other race types.
In conclusion it will be of interest to remark that Retzius was somewhat concerned as to the ultimate fate of his pure blond race. As is made evident in his Huxley lecture of 1909, he seemingly took the view of certain German writers that the North European race branch has for some thousands of years been slowly but steadily yielding ground to the short, dark, brachycephalic race branch, at
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