being little more than five feet.  As both sexes are considered together in this description, it is fair to give the male a stature of about five feet two inches,[B] It also corresponds with the stature assigned by Pitt-Rivers to a tribe occupying the borders of Wiltshire and Dorsetshire during the Roman occupation, the average height of whose males and females was five feet two and a half inches and four feet ten and three-quarter inches respectively.

[Footnote A:  Jour.  Ethn.  Soc., 1869-70, p. 455.]

[Footnote B:  Since these pages were printed, Prof.  Kollmann, of Basle, has described a group of Neolithic pigmies as having existed at Schaffhausen.  The adult interments consisted of the remains of full-grown European types and of small-sized people.  These two races were found interred side by side under precisely similar conditions, from which he concludes that they lived peaceably together, notwithstanding racial difference.  Their stature (about three feet six inches) may be compared with that of the Veddahs in Ceylon.  Prof.  Kollmann believes that they were a distinct species of mankind.]

Dr. Rahon,[A] who has recently made a careful study of the bones of pre-historic and proto-historic races, with special reference to their stature, states that the skeletons attributed to the most ancient and to the Neolithic races are of a stature below the middle height, the average being a little over five feet three inches.  The peoples who constructed the Megalithic remains of Roknia and of the Caucasus, were of a stature similar to our own.  The diverse proto-historic populations, Gauls, Franks, Burgundians, and Merovingians, considered together, present a stature slightly superior to that of the French of the present day, but not so much so as the accounts of the historians would have led us to believe.

[Footnote A:  Recherches sur les Ossements Humaines, Anciens et Prehistonques.  Mem. de la Soc. d’Anthrop. de Paris, Ser, ii. tom. iv. 403.]

It remains now to deal with two races whose physical characters are of considerable importance in connection with certain points which will be dealt with in subsequent pages, I mean the Lapps and the Innuit or Eskimo.

The Lapps, according to Karonzine,[A] one of their most recent describers, are divisible into two groups, Scandinavian and Russian, the former being purer than the latter race.  The average male stature is five feet, a figure which corresponds closely with that obtained by Mantegazza and quoted by Topinard.  The extremes obtained by this observer amongst men were, on the one hand, five feet eight inches, and on the other four feet four inches.  As, however, in a matter of this kind we have to deal with averages and not with extremes, we must conclude that the Lapps, though a stunted race, are not pigmies, in the sense in which the word is scientifically employed.

[Footnote A:  L’Anthropologie, ii. 80.]