Note 2097 — THE ETHNOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN (continued 2)

Mr. Alfred Nutt (Folk-Lore, xv, 1904, p. 234), commenting on a statement in Mr. Nicholson’s Keltic Researches (p. iv) that Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire are as Celtic (I should say as pre-Celtic) as South Wales and Ulster, asks whether it does not ‘demonstrate the absolute futility of statistics of “relative nigrescence”, or ... size of skulls. The Bucks peasant,’ he continues, ‘may be physiologically akin to the man from Kerry or Glamorganshire; psychically he differs profoundly.’ Yes, but this does not discredit the methods of physical anthropology: it only illustrates what I have said in the text. Between a certain number of individuals in Glamorganshire and a certain number in Buckinghamshire there is, let us assume, physical kinship: if we could isolate those two sets of individuals and compare them, instead of hastily comparing the populations of Glamorganshire and Buckinghamshire as wholes, we might find that the psychical difference was not as profound as Mr. Nutt supposes. Probably it would still be noticeable. But why? Partly because the physical resemblance is combined with a physical difference due to cross-breeding, the degree and nature of which it would be impossible to ascertain; partly because the environment, social, geographical, and climatic, of the peasants of Glamorganshire has for many centuries been very different from that of Buckinghamshire. Let two plum-puddings be made of identical sets of ingredients, but in slightly different quantities, in different kitchens, and by different cooks. The results will be very different. Or suppose that a thousand Spanish immigrants settled in Britain, and intermarried only among themselves. At the end of a century their physical and psychical types would have been modified. Nevertheless, handled with due skill and judgement, statistics of nigrescence and of cranial measurements retain their value.