it. The face of this type has an intelligent and dignified appearance. (2) The low type, as illustrated, according to Bertin, by the Jews captured at Lachish by Sennacherib, 701 B.C., and by the Phoenician sailors on a bas-relief in the British Museum. The head is round, the forehead low and retreating, but the nose is rarely much developed; in many cases the lips are thick, the hair frizzly, and the stature of the medium. This type, which may be due to a mixture with the same race as that which formed the low type of Mesopotamia, still sometimes recurs among the Ashkenazim (German-Polish) division of the Jewish race.

The persistency of the Jewish type is admitted on all hands, as Goethe stated this well-recognised fact in the following words: "Es ist das beharrlichste Volk der Erde. Es ist, es war, es wird sein." Joseph Jacobs, who has made an elaborate study of Jewish anthropology, states that the persistency of the Jewish type for the last 2600 years is conclusively proved by the Assyrian bas-relief of the captive Jews of Lachish.

Without going into further detail or multiplying references, it may be accepted that where a people, like the Jews, has kept itself fairly pure, and not intermarried to any considerable extent with peoples of alien blood, the ethnical characters may persist for some 3000 years. It is true that Renan, Neubauer,' and others have argued against the purity of the present-day Jews, but Jacobs traverses their arguments and arrives at opposite conclusions. He draws attention to the comparative infertility of mixed marriages, that is, between Jews and Gentiles, and to the superior potency of Jewish blood. Taking these facts into

1

Joseph Jacobs, "On the Racial Characteristics of Modern Jews."— Fourn. Anth. Inst., xv., 1885, p. 39.

2 A. Neubauer, Notes on the Race-Types of the Jews." — Ibid.,

P. 17.

consideration along with the very small number of mixed marriages in the past, especially with non-Semitic peoples, Jacobs sees" no reason from history for denying that the Jews of the present day were the direct descendants of the Jews of the Bible."''

There are undoubted wide divergencies from the Jewish type of skull, nose, eyes, hair, etc.; but the Rev. Dr. Hermann Adler, the Chief Rabbi, believes' that the dark and blond type are original, dating from Bible times, and described respectively: "His locks are curling, and black as a raven" (Canticles v., 11), and " He was ruddy, and withal fair of eyes and goodly to look upon " (1 Samuel xvi., 12). That the existence of the blond type was not due to intermarriage since Biblical times might be proved by the fact that it was to be found among the Jews of North Africa, Syria, Arabia, and Persia, where, owing to the prevalence of fanaticism, mixed marriages had rarely, if ever, taken place.

Dr. Felix von Luschan,' who has paid considerable attention to the problem of the origin of the Jews, states that the modern Bedouins must be considered as pure descendants of the old Semitic race. They have long, narrow heads, dark complexion, and a short, narrow, and straight nose, which is in every respect the direct opposite of what we are accustomed to call a typical Jewish nose." The earliest Phoenician skulls seem identical with old and modern Bedouin skulls. Of our modern Jews nearly fifty per cent. are broad-headed (brachycephalic), eleven per cent. have fair complexion, and not more than five per cent. correspond to what we now learn to be the real old Semitic type. In Northern Syria, the land of the old Aramæans, nearly all

1 Loc. cit., p. 62.

2 Journ. Anth. Inst., xv., p. 56.

3 Felix von Luschan, "Jews and Hittites."-Science, xxiii., 1894, p. 21.

the heads are brachycephalic, with indices near to 90, and these same brachycephalic elements we find everywhere in Western Asia. The Armenians are most remarkable for the nearly complete uniformity of their types, for their dark complexion, their extreme brachycephalism, and for their large and hooked " Jewish" nose.

These and other investigations lead us to the conviction that Syria and Asia Minor were in early times inhabited by a homogeneous and extremely brachycephalic race, of which the modern Armenians are the nearly pure descendants, and which we find more or less mixed with strange elements in many of the other races that now inhabit Western Asia. This old brachycephalic race, which from its beginning was utterly distinct from any Semitic tribe, and was in its physical aspect the very opposite of the Semites, can be identified, according to Von Luschan, only with the Hittites (the same Hittites mentioned as a Syrian tribe in the Bible), who had been a strong and formidable enemy to Ramses II., and were finally conquered by Assyrian kings in long wars and fights, beginning earlier than the times of Assurnassirpal and ending probably only in those of Esarhaddon, as we read in the Assyrian annals from the ninth century to the seventh century B.C. Excavations made a few years ago in Sendjirli, the old Sammâl, known in Assyrian texts as a Hittite residence in Northern Syria, have brought to light a large series of old Hittite sculptures; the Armenian character of the men represented on the walls and in the royal palaces of this old town is most striking, and we cannot err if we regard the inhabitants of Sammâl as the direct ancestors of the modern Armenians, who still inhabit the neighbourhood of the place, ill-treated in our times by Turks and Kurds, and without any knowledge of their glorious history in ancient and mediæval times.

The old Hittite inscriptions were in very curious, heavy,

and bulky-looking kind of hieroglyphics, but about 1000 B.C. the Semitic writing and language was introduced, which soon replaced the Hittite language and writing. For example, two inscriptions have been found, written by native kings, the one in the ninth, the other in the eighth century B.C., both in good old Semitic alphabetical characters. Thus, in the ninth century B.C. Semitic influence was great in Northern Syria, and we can easily understand how Semitic writing and language soon became dominant among people of Western Asia that were originally without a drop of Semitic blood; and then we understand also why most of our modern Jews have the Armenian type and not the Semitic.

The fair element among the modern Jews is best explained by an old, as opposed to a post-biblical racial mixture. This we may find in the intercourse of the old native Syrians with the Amorites and other Canaanites (Deut. ix., 2)," a people great and tall," who were fair and had blue eyes, as the old Egyptian painted monuments show us. These are the eastern representatives of the great Mediterranean race.

Von Luschan thus sums up his conclusions: "So we see in our modern Jews the descendants of three different races, the Hittites, the Amorites, and the Semitic nomads, who immigrated into Syria only about in the times of Abraham."

Much has been written upon the prevalence of red hair among the Jews. Jacobs' finds that it occurs among Sephardim (Spanish Jews) to a greater extent than among Ashkenazim (German-Polish Jews), and it has never been contended that the Sephardim have mixed much with any race markedly rufous, though a certain amount of erythrism (or red-hairiness) was introduced into Spain by the Goths. Where it does occur among Ashkenazim of North Europe it is found more among Jews than in the indigenous popula1 Loc. cit., p. 46.

tion. Jacobs points out that red hair seems to be only a natural complement to black, and its presence among Jews is not due to intermixture, but probably to defective nutrition.

The existence of blue eyes among Jews in relatively large proportions need not be regarded as overwhelming proofs of intermixture. As is well known, all eyes are blue at birth, and if no brown pigment is deposited in the front of the iris the eyes remain bluish to the end of life.

Thus blue eyes, as well as red hair, are a kind of minor albinism, and may result from defective nutrition, or other physiological causes. Jacobs finds confirmation in the view that this is the real cause of its occurrence among Jews from the fact that we find blue eyes among Asiatic as well as European Jews. On the other hand, this would be equally well accounted for by an infusion of Amoritic blood.

We may then accept the conclusion that the Jews have remained a persistent type for thousands of years, and that though they do now present variations in,their features, these are due not so much to subsequent miscegenation as to a primitive complexity of origin, as is partly evidenced by the Assyrian reliefs.

As the result of long experience Beddoe' has come to estimate very highly the permanence of the colours of hair and eyes. "It is," as he justly states, " of course impossible for an evolutionist to regard them as absolutely permanent. But one may readily conceive, as I do, that whenever a distinct and tolerably homogeneous breed has been established, its colour may remain very much the same so long as the conditions of natural selection remain nearly identical." The material to be worked upon, as he points out, lies ready to hand in our streets and market places, not hidden in museums and charnel houses.

1 Loc. cit., p. 47.

'John Beddoe, The Races of Britain, 1885, p. 2.