of the most diverse origins — Teuton, Latin, Slav — and we need only glance backward to discover Etruscans and Huns there also. Tribe follows tribe. But the skeletal structure in the mankind of the region in general is ever the same, and only on the edges, towards the plains, does it gradually disappear in favour of other forms, which are themselves likewise fixed. As to race, therefore, and the race-wanderings of primitive men, the famous finds of prehistoric bones, Neanderthal to Aurignacian, prove nothing. Apart from some conclusions from the jaw-bone as to the kinds of food eaten, they merely indicate the basic land-form that is found there to this day.
Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once in every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of the heavy hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from the South to the Rhine, and there it has certainly not visibly — i.e., botanically — changed. But in this instance "race" can be determined in other ways. There is a soil-born difference not merely between Southern and Northern, between Rhine and Moselle wines, but even between the products of every different site on every different hill-side; and the same holds good for every other high-grade vegetable "race," such as tea and tobacco. Aroma, a genuine growth of the country-side, is one of the hall-marks (all the more significant because they cannot be measured) of true race. But noble races of men are differentiated in just the same intellectual way as noble wines. There is a like element, only sensible to the finest perceptions, a faint aroma in every form, that underneath all higher Culture connects the Etruscans and the Renaissance in Tuscany,[1] and the Sumerians, the Persians of 500 B.C, and the Persians of Islam on the Tigris.
None of this is accessible to a science that measures and weighs. It exists for the feelings — with a plain certainty and at the first glance — but not for the savant's treatment. And the conclusion to which I come is that Race, like Time and Destiny, is a decisive element in every question of life, something which everyone knows clearly and definitely so long as he does not try to set himself to comprehend it by way of rational — i.e., soulless — dissection and ordering. Race, Time, and Destiny belong together. But the moment scientific thought approaches them, the word "Time" acquires the significance <ref follow="p129-2">Late Minoan II, the long heads fall to a startlingly low figure, while intermediates account for half, and short heads for more than a third. It marks the end of Minoan Civilization and the coming of the Achæans. But just as the Minoan skull held its own throughout the Minoan Age, so now, after its fall, the short head maintained itself, as stated in the text, through all subsequent vicissitudes, from the "Sea-peoples" through Roman, Arab, and Turk, to this day. Thus the Cretan landscape has had two skull-types successively; but the change from one to the other occurred in connexion with an immense cataclysm, nothing less than the collapse of a Civilization. The rough deduction that seems to emerge from this case is that a great Culture holds its skull, no doubt in the course of its striving towards ideal physical type of its own (see p. 127), but that where that major organism does not exist, the skull endures as the land endures and the peasant endures. This applies also to the Alpine region, which has received the deposit of migrations, but has never been the centre of a high Culture. — Tr.
- ↑ Cf. D. Randall-MacIver, The Etruscans (1928), Ch. I. — Tr.
