No ancient writer troubled himself with measuring skulls, and therefore there is no direct evidence as to the cranial characters of the fair and the dark stocks.  The indirect evidence is not very satisfactory.  The tumuli of Britain of pre-Roman date have yielded two extremely different forms of skull, the one broad and the other long; and the same variety has been observed in the skulls of the ancient Gauls[1].  The suggestion is obvious that the one form of skull may have been associated with the fair, and the other with the dark, complexion.  But any conclusion of this kind is at once checked by the reflection that the extremes of long and short-headedness are to be met with among the fair inhabitants of Germany and of Scandinavia at the present day—­the south-western Germans and the Swiss being markedly broad-headed, while the Scandinavians are as predominantly long-headed.

[Footnote 1:  See Dr. Thurnam “On the Two principal Forms of Ancient British and Gaulish Skulls.”]

What the natives of Ireland were like at the time of the Roman conquest of Britain, and for centuries afterwards, we have no certain knowledge; but the earliest trustworthy records prove the existence, side by side with one another, of a fair and a dark stock, in Ireland as in Britain.  The long form of skull is predominant among the ancient, as among modern, Irish.

II. The people termed Gauls, and those called Germans, by the Romans, did not differ in any important physical character.

The terms in which the ancient writers describe both Gauls and Germans are identical.  They are always tall people, with massive limbs, fair skins, fierce blue eyes, and hair the colour of which ranges from red to yellow.  Zeuss, the great authority on these matters, affirms broadly that no distinction in bodily feature is to be found between the Gauls, the Germans, and the Wends, so far as their characters are recorded by the old historians; and he proves his case by citations from a cloud of witnesses.

An attempt has been made to show that the colour of the hair of the Gauls must have differed very much from that which obtained among the Germans, on the strength of the story told by Suetonius (Caligula, 4), that Caligula tried to pass off Gauls for Germans by picking out the tallest, and making them “rutilare et summittere comam.”

The Baron de Belloguet remarks upon this passage:—­

“It was in the very north of Gaul, and near the sea, that Caligula got up this military comedy.  And the fact proves that the Belgae were already sensibly different from their ancestors, whom Strabo had found almost identical with their brothers on the other side of the Rhine.”

But the fact recorded by Suetonius, if fact it be, proves nothing; for the Germans themselves were in the habit of reddening their hair.  Ammianus Marcellinus[1] tells how, in the year 367 A.D., the Roman commander, Jovinus, surprised a body of Alemanni near the town now called Charpeigne, in the valley of the Moselle; and how the Roman soldiers, as, concealed by the thick wood, they stole upon their unsuspecting enemies, saw that some were bathing and others “comas rutilantes ex more.”  More than two centuries earlier Pliny gives indirect evidence to the same effect when he says of soap:—­