The tall, blonde Teutonic type of the Row graves is dolichocephalic.  Was the Celtic type (assuming that Broca’s “Celts” were not true Celts) dolicho or brachy?  Broca thinks the Belgae or “Kymri” were dolichocephalic, but all must agree with him that the skulls are too few to generalise from.  Celtic iron-age skulls in Britain are dolichocephalic, perhaps a recrudescence of the aboriginal type.  Broca’s “Kymric” skulls are mesocephalic; this he attributes to crossing with the short round-heads.  The evidence is too scanty for generalisation, while the Walloons, perhaps descendants of the Belgae, have a high index, and some Gauls of classical art are broad-headed.[19]

Skulls of the British round barrows (early Celtic Bronze Age) are mainly broad, the best specimens showing affinity to Neolithic brachycephalic skulls from Grenelle (though their owners were 5 inches shorter), Selaigneaux, and Borreby.[20] Dr. Beddoe thinks that the narrow-skulled Belgae on the whole reinforced the meso- or brachycephalic round barrow folk in Britain.  Dr. Thurnam identifies the latter with the Belgae (Broca’s Kymri), and thinks that Gaulish skulls were round, with beetling brows.[21] Professors Ripley and Sergi, disregarding their difference in stature and higher cephalic index, identify them with the short Alpine race (Broca’s Celts).  This is negatived by Mr. Keane.[22] Might not both, however, have originally sprung from a common stock and reached Europe at different times?[23]

But do a few hundred skulls justify these far-reaching conclusions regarding races enduring for thousands of years?  At some very remote period there may have been a Celtic type, as at some further period there may have been an Aryan type.  But the Celts, as we know them, must have mingled with the aborigines of Europe and become a mixed race, though preserving and endowing others with their racial and mental characteristics.  Some Gauls or Belgae were dolichocephalic, to judge by their skulls, others were brachycephalic, while their fairness was a relative term.  Classical observers probably generalised from the higher classes, of a purer type; they tell us nothing of the people.  But the higher classes may have had varying skulls, as well as stature and colour of hair,[24] and Irish texts tell of a tall, fair, blue-eyed stock, and a short, dark, dark-eyed stock, in Ireland.  Even in those distant ages we must consider the people on whom the Celts impressed their characteristics, as well as the Celts themselves.  What happened on the Eurasian steppe, the hypothetical cradle of the “Aryans,” whence the Celts came “stepping westwards,” seems clear to some, but in truth is a book sealed with seven seals.  The men whose Aryan speech was to dominate far and wide may already have possessed different types of skull, and that age was far from “the very beginning.”