Probability is rendered certainty by corroborative evidence from a large part of Europe that the Alpine type for some reason always takes to the woods and hills when in competition with the Teutonic race. We shall be able to show it in detail for France, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere, as we have already done for the Tyrol. Just across the Rhine in the Vosges it is true, and in Belgium it determines the division line of Walloons from Flemings. We may accept the law as proved beyond reasonable doubt.
This population of the inner Black Forest being Alpïne, ought racially to be dark in the color of the hair and eyes. Nevertheless, the evidence all goes to show that, instead of being darker, it really manifests a distinct tendency toward blondness. Here, again, we are able to draw proof from two separate sources which serve as a check upon one another. The ground tints upon our map represent the percentage of pure blondes among the school children, as gathered in the great census conducted by Virchow. They show that a considerable part of the "Alpine area," measuring the head form, contains an abormal number of blond children. For example, forty-two hundred children in this Alpine area comprised but fifteen per cent of blond types, as compared with an average of nearly twenty-five per cent in the Rhine and Neckar Valleys. For Baden, however, the blondness of the upland interior region does not appear upon this map. Fortunately, we possess detailed results for this side of even greater value, since Dr. Ammon has studied the adult population. He asserts that there is a regularly increasing blondness toward the center of the Forest.[1] Why did this not appear among the thousands of school children in Baden studied by Virchow? To venture a rash hypothesis, may it not have been because the influences of environment had not had time to produce their effects so strongly in childhood, and that they appeared in accentuated form at a later period of life? Before we proceed to discuss the exact cause of this surprising reversal of racial characteristics, let us consider one other example of a similar character.
Some years ago Dr. Stucler conducted a great investigation upon the color of the hair and eyes of some ninety-four thousand school children in the canton of Berne, in Switzerland.[2] As a result he discovered another one of these confusing phenomena of racial improbabilities. It appeared that here also there was an appreciable tendency toward blondness in the high Alps, racial tendencies to the contrary notwithstanding. Topographically,
- ↑ For example, Wolfach, in the southern part of the "Alpine area," with the broadest heads in Baden, contains thirty-one per cent of blondes among adults. Ammon, op. cit. In this commune sixty-four per cent of the cephalic indices were above 85.
- ↑ Mitteilungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Bern, 1880, Heft 979, p. 54 seq.
