The Slavs.
By Aleš Hrdlička.
Curator, Division of Physical Anthropology,
U. S. National Museum.
The greatest defect of the Slavs is that that they do not know themselves; and their greatest disadvantage is that others do not know them.
General Account.
The European whites are divisible into four great strains, which are the Nordic, the Alpine, the Mediterranean, and the Slav. Of these the Slav strain is the greatest in numbers.
These strains are sometimes called “races”, which is not quite accurate. They differ from each other in certain features, such as the prevailing shade of the eyes, hair and the skin, in the form of the head, height of body, physiognomy, and even in mentality, but they merge into each other without any fixed lines of demarcation. And they are not equally apart from each other—thus a large proportion of the Slavs is practically identical with the Alpines, while some of the most important characteristics are common to groups which other wise show racial differences. This is, for example, the case with the important feature of the form of the head, which in general is closely alike in the Nordics and the Mediterraneans, who differ so much in mean stature, pigmentation and other particulars. Moreover, these strains are not strictly homogeneous within themselves, their diverse characteristics varying more or less with localities. Thus the Russian and the Jugoslav differ in more than one respect, though remaining alike in essentials. Finally, there is evidence that some of these great strains, if not all, have undergone since historic times, and are still undergoing, gradual alteration in head form, pigmentation, and other features. All of which renders the term “strain”, rather than “race”, as applied to these different groups, the more correct and congruous.
The Slav strain is strictly indigenous to Europe. Due mainly to its present short-headedness there have been suggestions, even by serious men of science, that it may have originated in Asia; but these suggestions remained mere hypotheses. There are no Slavs and no Slav type in Asia, except those of recent immigration. On the other hand strong evidence has been accumulating that, like the rest of Europeans, the Slavs had their origin in the more homogeneous neolithic population of that continent, and that they developed their language, institutions and character in the great region which is drained by the Visla (Vistula) river. It is well known now, for instance, that they carried some of the more important physical characteristics of their stone-age forefathers, such as an oblong head form, well into the historic period. Their language, their myths and traditions, their sedentary habits and devotion to agriculture, are all European.
It is from the regions that later became Poland and Galicia and from the Carpathians, that the Slavs spread, between perhaps as early as 1000 B. C. and the seventh century of our era, over a large part of what is now eastern Germany, over all the territories that eventually became Austria-Hungary and over nearly the whole of the Balkan peninsula; and it is from the same regions that, from the seventh to the nineteenth century, the irresistible flood spread gradually all over what is now European Russia, and eventually over Siberia, Turkestan and the Caucasus.
The fundamental causes of the vast spread of the Slavs against all obstructions are in general as yet imperfectly understood. These causes were not a mere lust of conquest, or of domination, or of rapine. They were, first of all, an important physiological condition which underlies their spread of today, namely a great fertility. They gradually outbred their territorial and other resources, as well as the peoples with whom they were in contact, and when the internal pressure of population rose above the external, they overflowed in all directions of less resistance. Important contributory causes favoring these overflows were ravages of neighboring territories by the various early nordic and eurasic invasions, and internecine wars among the contiguous non-Slav peoples, all of which diminished the resistance to the Slav extension. The whole process of the Slav spread, especially in the earlier times, was thus essentially a natural one or what might be called one of vital competition, radically at variance with the more or less predatory and ephemeral invasions of the Goths, Van-
