The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America. Grant Madison

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the glacial period and immediately thereafter, we may get nearer to an answer to the question of where and how this race originated and developed. It is certain, however, that the Nordics were originally located west of the Alpines and Mongols and north of the Mediterraneans.

      We have fossil records of five or six extinct species or genera of man and more are constantly coming to light in Asia and outlying regions of the Old World. The impulse that forced the ancestors of man to develop his high energy and intelligence probably arose from the onset of the Pleistocene glaciation a million or more years ago. Mankind was then forced apart into widely separated areas where specific characters developed in isolation. The Nordics were most likely cut off from Asia by the Caspian and Aral Seas, which extended far to the north, where they met the oncoming ice. It was west of this barrier that the Nordic race developed its peculiar characters.

      Later, when the ice retreated and this watery barrier disappeared, the Nordics were inundated again and again by floods of Asiatics, first Alpines and then Mongols. Sometimes the Nordics became the aggressors and expanded eastward in turn, conquering Persia, India, and Burma. Blond invaders of East Asia, called "the green-eyed devils," attacked the Great Wall of China as late as 200 B.C. They were also called "Wusuns," a Tatar word meaning "the tall ones." In the long run, however, the Nordics were forced westward.

      When the retreating glaciers left habitable land in Scandinavia, it was into this region that the first westward migration of the Nordics found its way. This was probably as early as 8000 B.C. There it was, through the fogs and long winters of the north, that they developed in complete isolation their great stature and musculature, their fair or flaxen hair, and their blue eyes. The continental Nordics, however, who moved westward to settle around the Baltic and North Seas, retained the more generalized characters of brown hair of various shades, and eyes which tend to either brown, gray, or, to a less extent, blue. The light eyes of the Nordics include light brown or hazel, and may be of any and all shades of gray and green to the deepest violet blue.

      The racial characters which most noticeably distinguish the Nordics are the colors of the skin, hair, and eyes. As sharply contrasted with the skin of the Mediterranean peoples, the color of the blood shows through the fair Nordic skin except when tanned by exposure to the sun. The light-colored hair is almost always blond in youth, turning darker with age, although in many individuals extreme blondness is retained through life. The brown hair, characteristic of the Nordics of the British Isles and America, runs from light to very dark brown; but blue-black hair, so rare in England and among native Americans, is never Nordic. The blond hair may tend towards golden red. In fact, in classic times, red hair seems to have been more common than now and may be more characteristic of the Celtic Nordics than of the Teutonic Nordics. In race mixtures between blond and black-haired peoples, the blondness tends to be lost.

      On the other hand, light-colored eyes are much more persistent, and this sign of Nordic admixture is found about ten times more frequently than is blond hair among such peoples as the Albanians, where all other Nordic characters except stature seem to have been lost.

      For thousands of years, Europe has been an arena of racial mixtures. Over great territories, as we shall see, the Nordic race has been dominant for the past thirty centuries, so that the majority of Alpine and Mediterranean types shows the impress of Nordic characters. For example, in Bavaria are found short, stocky, round-skulled Alpines with extremely blond hair and blue eyes. The French, who are today preponderantly Alpine, show outcroppings of profound Nordic characters throughout the population. Thus, while pure types exist everywhere in sufficient numbers to enable us to define race, nevertheless there has been so much intermixture in the past that it is hard sometimes to assign a given individual to a specific race. The definition of race, in fact, cannot be based on any one character, but on a preponderance of many racial characters which make up the resultant type.

      We have now considered the main races of mankind, but should devote space to the Mongols and their derivatives. The Mongol is undoubtedly a very ancient and major subdivision of the Hominidæ, but appears to be intrusive in much of its present range. In Southeast Asia and in the Malay countries and islands it arrived later than the ancient Negroids.

      The Mongoloids, as stated above, are characterized by a short, stocky build and generally a round skull, very straight black hair with a round cross section, a broad flat face with projecting malar bones, and a slanting eye often marked by the Mongol fold. The last characters distinguish them from the Alpine race, but are sometimes to be found in such members of that race as have a Mongoloid admixture.

      These Mongolian characters occur often in Bohemia, in Moravia, and especially in Galicia, in which last province they probably date from the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Such traits, however, are not found among the Alpines of southern Germany or France.

      In the American Indians, Mongoloid blood undoubtedly predominates but the high-bridged nose of some of the tribes and their high stature undoubtedly point to admixture with other races.

      The Mongol is not inferior to the Nordic in intelligence, as is the Negro, but represents such a divergent type that the mixture between Nordics and Chinese or Japanese is not a good one. The overflow of these Asiatics into our Pacific Coast might have Mongolized the States there, had not the American laboring man taken alarm and secured legislation forbidding their immigration.

      With the foregoing as a simple and generalized description of the primitive races of mankind as we know them today, and with special emphasis on the three principal European variants of the "white" race, we shall proceed to consider the distribution and racial influence of the Nordics in western Europe.

      III THE NORDIC CONQUEST OF EUROPE

       Table of Contents

      About 1300 B.C. a blond, blue-eyed race of Libyans appears in Egyptian sculptures. Whence these blonds came or how they got into Libya is not known, but it is interesting to note that blond Berbers are to be found today in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. These, however, are probably more recent arrivals from the north.

      About 1800 B.C. traces of Nordic infiltration appeared among the Hittites. These Nordic conquerors later entered Mesopotamia as the Mitanni and the Kassites, although it may be that they were only the ruling classes of these peoples.

      In recorded history the Nordics first appear in the West as Achæans. They came from the North from the Dacian Plains and conquered Greece and Phrygia about 1400 or 1500 B.C.

About 1200 or 1300 B.C. a Nordic people, the Osco-Umbrians, sweeping down from the northeast, entered Italy. They were kindred to the Achæans and were the ancestors of the Latin tribes, including the early Romans. The aboriginal Mediterraneans were driven into southern Italy, where, in Calabria and Apulia, they persist to this day. The contrast between the peoples of North and South Italy is still profound.²

      The Continental Nordics, as Celtic tribes, entered Gaul in the ninth century B.C. From the evidence of place names, they passed through South Germany. All Gaul except Aquitania, in the southwest, was overwhelmed.

      Spain was conquered by Celtic Nordics about 600 B.C., but their domination was never complete and they soon mingled with the natives. The mixed inhabitants of the peninsula were called Celtiberians by the Romans.

      During this same period the British Isles were overrun and thoroughly occupied by Celtic Nordics named Goidels and the Celtic tongue was imposed upon the Mediterranean population, although the latter survived as a race in large numbers, especially in the western parts of England and Ireland. These Celtic-speaking Mediterraneans were, until recently, called "Iberians"; but fifteen hundred СКАЧАТЬ