There are two ways in which we may seek to assemble our separate physical traits into types—that is, to combine characteristics into living personalities. The one is purely anthropological, the other inferential and geographical in its nature. The first of these is simple. Answer is sought to a direct question. In a given population, are the blondes more often tall than the brunettes, or the reverse? Is the greater proportion of the tall men at the same time distinctly longer-headed or otherwise? and the like. If the answers to these questions be constant and consistent, our work is accomplished. Unfortunately they are not always so, hence our necessary recourse to the geographical proof: but they at least indicate a slight trend, which we may follow up by the other means.
Let it be boldly confessed at the outset that in the great number of cases no invariable association of traits in this way occurs. This is especially true among the people of the central part of Europe. The population of Switzerland, for example, is persistently aberrant in this respect; it is everything anthropologically that it ought not to be. This should not surprise us. In the first place, mountainous areas always contain the "ethnological sweepings of the plains," as Canon Taylor puts it. Especially is this true when the mountains lie in the very heart of the continent, at a focus of racial immigration. Moreover, the environment is competent to upset all probabilities, as we hope to have shown. Suppose a brunette type from the south should come to Andermatt and settle. If the altitude exerts an influence upon the pigmentation, as we have sought to prove; or if its concomitant poverty in the ante-tourist era should depress the stature, the racial equilibrium is as good as vanished in two or three generations. It is therefore only where the environment is simple; and especially on the outskirts of the continent, where migration and intermixture are more infrequent, that any constant and normal association of traits may be anticipated. Take a single example from many. We have always been taught to regard the Teutonic peoples—the Goths, Lombards, and Saxons—as tawny-haired, "large-limbed giants." History is filled with observations to that effect from the earliest times. Our maps have already led us to infer as much. Nevertheless, direct observations show that tall stature and blondness are by no means constant companions in the same person. In Scandinavia, Dr. Arbo asserts, I think, that the tallest men are at the same time inclined to blondness. In Italy, on the other edge of the continent, the same combination is certainly prevalent.[1] Over in Russia, once more on the outskirts of Europe,[2] the tall men are again found to be
