always existed in some
of the localities in which they are now found, nor do the negroes ever
seem to have voluntarily travelled beyond the limits of their present
area. But ancient history is in a great measure the record of the
mutual encroachments of the other three stocks.

On the whole, however, it is wonderful how little change has been
effected by these mutual invasions and intermixtures. As at the
present time, so at the dawn of history, the Melanochroi fringed
the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; the Xanthochroi occupied most
of Central and Eastern Europe, and much of Western and Central Asia;
while Mongolians held the extreme east of the Old World. So far as
history teaches us, the populations of Europe, Asia, and Africa were,
twenty centuries ago, just what they are now, in their broad features
and general distribution.

The evidence yielded by Archaeology is not very definite, but, so
far as it goes, it is to much the same effect. The mound builders of
Central America seem to have had the characteristic short and broad
head of the modern inhabitants of that continent. The tumuli and tombs
of Ancient Scandinavia, of pre-Roman Britain, of Gaul, of Switzerland,
reveal two types of skull--a broad and a long--of which, in
Scandinavia, the broad seems to have belonged to the older stock,
while the reverse was probably the case in Britain, and certainly
in Switzerland. It has been assumed that the broad-skulled people of
ancient Scandinavia were Lapps; but there is no proof of the fact,
and they may have been, like the broad-skulled Swiss and Germans,
Xanthochroi. One of the greatest of ethnological difficulties is to
know where the modern Swedes, Norsemen, and Saxons got their long
heads, as all their neighbours, Fins, Lapps, Slavonians, and
South Germans, are broad-headed. Again, who were the small-handed,
long-headed people of the "bronze epoch," and what has become of the
infusion of their blood among the Xanthochroi?

At present Palaeontology yields no safe data to the ethnologist. We
know absolutely nothing of the ethnological characters of the men of
Abbeville and Hoxne; but must be content with the demonstration, in
itself of immense value, that Man existed in Western Europe when its
physical condition was widely different from what it is now, and
when animals existed, which, though they belong to what is, properly
speaking, the present order of things, have long been extinct. Beyond
the limits of a fra