no less than twenty-one come under Dr. Broca's definition of "départements noirs." In this we have the clearest proof that the choice by Augustus of the latter river as the boundary of the province was due to the identity of race of the dwellers south of the Loire with those of the Garonne, which would cause them to be more easily governed from a Basque than from a Celtic centre. (Compare Maps, Figs. 112, 113.) The five departments of Loire Inférieure, Vendée, Maine et Loire, Deux Sèvres, and Charente Inférieure, in which the prevailing population is of moderate stature, with brown hair and gray or brown eyes, lie on the seaboard open to invasion; and the six "départements gris," south of the Garonne, mark the settlements of the fair-haired Visigoths, Franks, and English, who have been masters of that country from the year A.D. 419 to the present day. That the ancient population was to a considerable extent dispossessed is demonstrated by the conditions under which it passed under the Gothic yoke, that two-thirds of the land and one-third of the slaves were to become the property of their conquerors.[1] The departments in question may be said at the present day to be occupied by a Celt-Ibero-Teutonic people, whose physique is intermediate between the vanquished and the victors.
Outside the boundaries of Aquitaine the Iberian blood asserts itself in the swarthy small inhabitants of Brittany—in the east in Ardèche, and in the south in Aude and Arriège. I have already hinted at the probability of a connection between Armorica and Aquitaine from a passage in Pliny which has been quoted, and we have seen that Iberia, in ancient times, extended eastward to the Rhone and westward to the ocean. The Armoricans
- ↑ Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, iv. 440.
