I am unable to discover any grounds for believing that a Lapp element
has ever entered into the population of these islands. So far as the
physical evidence goes, it is perfectly consistent with the hypothesis
that the only constituent stocks of that population, now, or at any
other period about which we have evidence, are the dark whites, whom
I have proposed to call "_Melanochroi_" and the fair whites, or
"_Xanthochroi._"

IV. _The Xanthochroi and the Melanochroi of Britain are, speaking
broadly, distributed, at present, as they were in the time of Tacitus;
and their representatives on the continent of Europe have the same
general distribution as at the earliest period of which we have any
record._

At the present day, and notwithstanding the extensive intermixture
effected by the movements consequent on civilization and on political
changes, there is a predominance of dark men in the west, and of fair
men in the east and north, of Britain. At the present day, as from
the earliest times, the predominant constituents of the riverain
population of the North Sea and the eastern half of the British
Channel, are fair men. The fair stock continues in force through
Central Europe, until it is lost in Central Asia. Offshoots of this
stock extend into Spain, Italy, and Northern India, and by way of
Syria and North Africa, to the Canary Islands. They were known in
very early times to the Chinese, and in still earlier to the ancient
Egyptians, as frontier tribes. The Thracians were notorious for their
fair hair and blue eyes many centuries before our era.

On the other hand, the dark stock predominates in Southern and
Western France, in Spain, along the Ligurian shore, and in Western and
Southern Italy; in Greece, Asia, Syria, and North Africa; in Arabia,
Persia, Afghanistan, and Hindostan, shading gradually, through all
stages of darkening, into the type of the modern Egyptian, or of the
wild Hill-man of the Dekkan. Nor is there any record of the existence
of a different population in all these countries.

The extreme north of Europe, and the northern part of Western Asia,
are at present occupied by a Mongoloid stock, and, in the absence of
evidence to the contrary, may be assumed to have been so peopled from
a very remote epoch. But, as I have said, I can find no evidence that
this stock ever took part in peopling Britain. Of the three great
stocks of mankind which extend from the western coast of the
great Eurasiatic