the cities, although the opposite is more often true south of Rome.[1] It is true of Paris and Lyons especially, the department of the Seine being well below the average for France and for the neighboring departments.[2] In Spain the only indication of the law is offered by Madrid, where nearly seven hundred conscripts have been measured in detail.[3] In this latter country, as in the British Isles,[4] and in southern Italy, as we have observed, everywhere in fact on the outskirts of Europe where the Alpine broad-headed race is but sparsely represented, we find the contrasts in head form between city and country absent in great measure. Observations on four hundred and eighty-seven American college students have not yielded me any differences in this respect. Only where the Alpine race forms an appreciable element in the population does "Ammon's law" appear to hold true.
The circumstance which we have mentioned, that only in those portions of Europe where the Alpine broad-headed type is strongly in evidence do we find a more prevalent long-headedness in the city populations, suggests a criticism upon the somewhat extravagant claims to the universality of "Ammon's law" made by ardent disciples of the school of so-called "anthropo-sociologists." It is this: City populations are the inevitable result of great intermixture of blood; they of necessity contain a hodge-podge of all the ethnic elements which lie within the territory tributary to them, which, in other words, lie within what Lapouge has aptly termed their "spheres of attraction."[5]As a whole, one should not expect to find the extreme individuality of type in the cities, which can persist alone in the isolated areas free from ethnic intermixture. If, as in Baden, in Brittany, or along the Rhône Valley, an extremely broad-headed type of population is localized in the mountains, as we know it is all over Europe; while along the rivers and on the seacoast are found many representatives of an immigrant Teutonic long-headed people; it would not be surprising that cities located on the border line of the two areas should contain a majority of human types intermediate between the two extremes on either side. These city populations would naturally be longer-headed than the pure Alpine race behind them in the mountains, and coincidently broader-headed than the pure Teutons along the rivers and on the seacoast. The experience of Italy is instructive. In this country the transition from a pure Alpine broad-headed population in the north to an equally pure and long-headed Mediterranean type in the south is
- ↑ Livi, 1896 a, pp. 87-89, 147, 148, 151, 159, and 187.
- ↑ Lapouge, 1897, p 70.
- ↑ Oloriz, 1894 b, pp. 47 and 279; also pp. 173 and 224.
- ↑ Beddoe, 1894, p. 664.
- ↑ This point I have discussed at length, borrowing largely from Livi's superb work on Italy, in the Publications of the American Statistical Association, v, 1896, pp. 37 et seq.
