Turn back for a moment to the map of head form on page 440, and notice the curious light-tinted area in the heart of this south western region. It seems to be confined to four departments, lying between Limoges on the northeast and Bordeaux at the southwest.
This little island or sink, if you please, of long-headedness has for years been a puzzle to anthropologists. It is a veritable outcrop of dolichocephaly close to the great body of broad-headedness which centers in Auvergne. It lies, to be sure, at the southwestern extremity of that axis of fertility from Paris to Bordeaux which we described in our last paper. In conformity with the law of differentiation of populations which holds all through the north, a long-headed people is found in the plains. The trouble is that the people are altogether too extreme. The general law is out-proved by it. The remoteness of this spot from any other great center of long-headedness constitutes the main point of interest. Such a trait ought to have been derived either from the north or the south of Europe. Teutonic intermixture is not a competent explanation for two reasons. In the first place,
Annales de Géographie, Paris, 1896, pp. 150-166. Our maps are adapted from this latter source. (J. Lagneau, Ethnogénie des Populations du Sud-ouest de la France, in Revue d'Anth., 1872, pp. 606-628, gives much interesting historical material.
