is obvious that the one form of skull may
have been associated with the fair, and the other with the dark,
complexion. But any conclusion of this kind is at once checked by the
reflection that the extremes of long and short-headedness are to be
met with among the fair inhabitants of Germany and of Scandinavia
at the present day--the south-western Germans and the Swiss being
markedly broad-headed, while the Scandinavians are as predominantly
long-headed.

[Footnote 1: See Dr. Thurnam "On the Two principal Forms of Ancient
British and Gaulish Skulls."]

What the natives of Ireland were like at the time of the Roman
conquest of Britain, and for centuries afterwards, we have no certain
knowledge; but the earliest trustworthy records prove the existence,
side by side with one another, of a fair and a dark stock, in Ireland
as in Britain. The long form of skull is predominant among the
ancient, as among modern, Irish.

II. _The people termed Gauls, and those called Germans, by the Romans,
did not differ in any important physical character._

The terms in which the ancient writers describe both Gauls and Germans
are identical. They are always tall people, with massive limbs, fair
skins, fierce blue eyes, and hair the colour of which ranges from
red to yellow. Zeuss, the great authority on these matters, affirms
broadly that no distinction in bodily feature is to be found between
the Gauls, the Germans, and the Wends, so far as their characters are
recorded by the old historians; and he proves his case by citations
from a cloud of witnesses.

An attempt has been made to show that the colour of the hair of the
Gauls must have differed very much from that which obtained among the
Germans, on the strength of the story told by Suetonius (Caligula, 4),
that Caligula tried to pass off Gauls for Germans by picking out the
tallest, and making them "rutilare et summittere comam."

The Baron de Belloguet remarks upon this passage:--

"It was in the very north of Gaul, and near the sea, that
Caligula got up this military comedy. And the fact proves
that the Belgae were already sensibly different from their
ancestors, whom Strabo had found almost identical with their
_brothers_ on the other side of the Rhine."

But the fact recorded by Suetonius, if fact it be, proves nothing;
for the Germans themselves were in the habit of reddening their hair.
Ammianus Marcellinus[1] tells how, in the year 367 A.D., the Rom