CONCLUSION

is needed more than anything else in this respect is a thoroughgoing study of the inhabitants of the principal and most powerful nations of Europe.

Much more badly needed, however, than data on the living is the publication of skeletal material of all cultural periods in European pre­history and history. European museums and private collections abound with skulls and long bones, only a small proportion of which have as yet been made available through the literature. Most of these are of Neolithic or later date; when a skull of alleged or real glacial age is discovered, it is, as a rule, soon published.

In the reconstruction of the racial history of the white race which appears in the preceding chapters, the reader may readily discover that there are many weak places and gaps, which have been bridged by the use of far too little data. This has been done intentionally, so that the picture may appear as a whole, and so that a logical, if hypothetical, scheme may be devised. It is inevitable that between the writing and the printing of this sentence, some of these gaps will have been filled by the discovery or collection of new data, and that some of the reconstructions will be proved false, while others, we hope, may perhaps be confirmed. He who offers a scheme explaining the totality of anything must be bold or his scheme is useless; he must not, above all, be afraid of exposure. The theorizers of one generation furnish pleasure to the fact finders of the next, by giving them something to tear down, and by daring to be wrong.

Before a second edition of this book is written, or other books compiled to disprove or replace it, it is my sincere wish that more light will be shed by the fraternity of diggers and measurers upon at least the following problems: (a) the skeletal history of the Mediterranean race in pre-food- producing times; (b) the unveiling of that great European mystery, the Mesolithic; (c) the origin and history of the Alpines; (d) the same for the Corded people; (e) the same for the bearers of the Megalithic culture into the western Mediterranean and northwestern Europe. There are many other weak spots in our fabric, but these seem, to me at least, to be the weakest.

2. The white race and the new world

Since the recession of the last glacier, the principal movement of the white race has been northward and westward, until the center of popula­tion and of civilization has shifted from Africa and Asia to southern Europe, and from southern Europe to the northwest. From roughly 3000 B.C. until 1492 a.d., the various branches of the Mediterranean race which had followed the rain belts into Europe were busy expanding in the countries which they had settled, and in assimilating the stray remnants of the older hunting population, which they had absorbed.

651

Before 1492 a.d., for at least five centuries, the racial history of many parts of Europe consisted of an internal genetic adjustment, in the process of which the Mediterranean strains, so much more numerous at the time of their settlement in Europe than the total of the aborigines, were to a certain extent bred out and replaced by a reemergence of the old types, and to a larger extent recombined genetically with the old types in re- emergence to produce something new. Even within the Mediterranean stock, different strains in one population have showed differential survival values and often one has reemerged at the expense of others.

In 1492 a.d., the maximum survival of Mediterraneans (in the widest sense) in Europe in the face of these reemergences was to be found in pe­ripheral countries; Spain, Portugal, England, the Netherlands, Sweden, and parts of Norway. It was precisely these countries, especially Spain, Portugal, England, and the Netherlands, which furnished the materials for the initial peopling by Europeans of the New World, and to the New World in the sense of the two Americas were soon to be added South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Mediterraneans who peopled the New World were of two principal varieties, Nordics and small, or Ibero-Insular (in Deniker’s sense), Mediter­raneans. The Nordics went to North America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, the Mediterraneans proper to Central and South America. Wherever the Nordics went, they found lands occupied by scattered tribes of hunters and gatherers, or of river-side agriculturalists who were too few to offer them successful resistance. The wars with the Blackfeet and the Sioux were long and bloody, but the Blackfeet and the Sioux have lost their racial hold on their land as completely as have the Arunta. Dispos­session and gradual extinction has been the fate of those who opposed the English and the Dutch, whether their opponents were Bushmen or Tasma­nians or Beothuks.

The Spanish, on the other hand, went mostly to countries where a dense native population lived close to the soil, and where mighty empires had already arisen; their colonization was largely a matter of conquest and subjugation, and in all the American countries of Spanish settlement, excepting Argentina and Chile, the Indian farmer has reemerged, and the Spaniard forms but an upper crust. The Portuguese, carving out, in Brazil, a vast empire of river and forest, found but little land suitable for the habitation of whites, and into this they brought black men from Africa whose descendants are now the chief possessors of the soil.

The expansion of the Mediterraneans, using the word in the larger sense, into the New World, was an extension of their earlier expansion into Europe. North America became, by the nineteenth century, the greatest Nordic reservoir in the world. But the century which saw the erection

CONCLUSION

of this reservoir also witnessed the beginnings of its change in character; the tide of immigration brought with it members of all the other races of Europe. The people who came to America, from the time of the Pilgrim Fathers to the imposition of the laws restricting immigration, were selected; none were fully representative of the countries from which they came. In America they were subjected to environmental forces of a new and stimulating nature, so that changes in growth such as their ancestors had not felt for centuries produced strange, gangling creatures of their children. In America we have before our eyes the rapid action of race-building forces; if we wish to understand the principles which have motivated the racial history of the Old World, it behooves us to pay careful attention to the New.

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