But were the short, brachycephalic folk Celts?  Caesar says the people who call themselves “Celtae” were called Gauls by the Romans, and Gauls, according to classical writers, were tall and fair.[11] Hence the Celtae were not a short, dark race, and Caesar himself says that Gauls (including Celtae) looked with contempt on the short Romans.[12] Strabo also says that Celtae and Belgae had the same Gaulish appearance, i.e. tall and fair.  Caesar’s statement that Aquitani, Galli, and Belgae differ in language, institutions, and laws is vague and unsupported by evidence, and may mean as to language no more than a difference in dialects.  This is also suggested by Strabo’s words, Celtae and Belgae “differ a little” in language.[13] No classical writer describes the Celts as short and dark, but the reverse.  Short, dark people would have been called Iberians, without respect to skulls.  Classical observers were not craniologists.  The short, brachycephalic type is now prominent in France, because it has always been so, eliminating the tall, fair Celtic type.  Conquering Celts, fewer in number than the broad and narrow-headed aborigines, intermarried or made less lasting alliances with them.  In course of time the type of the more numerous race was bound to prevail.  Even in Caesar’s day the latter probably outnumbered the tall and fair Celts, who had, however, Celticised them.  But classical writers, who knew the true Celt as tall and fair, saw that type only, just as every one, on first visiting France or Germany, sees his generalised type of Frenchman or German everywhere.  Later, he modifies his opinion, but this the classical observers did not do.  Caesar’s campaigns must have drained Gaul of many tall and fair Celts.  This, with the tendency of dark types to out-number fair types in South and Central Europe, may help to explain the growing prominence of the dark type, though the tall, fair type is far from uncommon.[14]

(2) The second theory, already anticipated, sees in Gauls and Belgae a tall, fair Celtic folk, speaking a Celtic language, and belonging to the race which stretched from Ireland to Asia Minor, from North Germany to the Po, and were masters of Teutonic tribes till they were driven by them from the region between Elbe and Rhine.[15] Some Belgic tribes claimed a Germanic ancestry,[16] but “German” was a word seldom used with precision, and in this case may not mean Teutonic.  The fair hair of this people has made many suppose that they were akin to the Teutons.  But fairness is relative, and the dark Romans may have called brown hair fair, while they occasionally distinguished between the “fair” Gauls and fairer Germans.  Their institutions and their religions (pace Professor Rh[^y]s) differed, and though they were so long in contact the names of their gods and priests are unlike.[17] Their languages, again, though of “Aryan” stock, differ more from each other than does Celtic from Italic, pointing to a long period of Italo-Celtic unity, before Italiotes and Celts separated, and Celts came in contact with Teutons.[18] The typical German differs in mental and moral qualities from the typical Celt.  Contrast an east country Scot, descendant of Teutonic stock, with a West Highlander, and the difference leaps to the eyes.  Celts and Germans of history differ, then, in relative fairness, character, religion, and language.