Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/648

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
632
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

wide regarded as a type of beauty. We know that the Basques are proud of this trait. May they not have evolved it, or at least perpetuated it, by sexual choice perhaps? This, of course, is

merely supposition on our part, but it seems to be worthy of mention.[1]

The development of a facial type peculiar to certain localities is by no means a rare phenomenon. We shall have occasion to


  1. The apparently contradictory low stature in Spanish Navarra need not disturb us. No attempt was made by Oloriz to differentiate the Basque half of the province from the other. Hence the figures obtained are truly characteristic of neither. The data are defective for all Spain, as compared with the detailed researches of Collignon upon the French side.