Ireland, Historic and PicturesqueJohnston, Charles
History
Ireland, Historic and Picturesque
Johnston, Charles
Ireland -- Description and travel; Ireland -- History
But it is by no means in Ireland only that this tall, dark, western race
is found. It is numerously represented in the nearest extension of the
continent, among the headlands and bays and isles of Brittany--a land so
like our own western seaboard, with its wild Atlantic storms.
Following the ocean southward, we find the same race extending to the
Loire, the Garonne, the Pyrenees; stretching somewhat inland also, but
clinging everywhere to the Atlantic, as we also saw it cling in Ireland.
In earlier centuries, long before our era opened, we find this same race
spread far to the east,--as far, almost, as the German and Italian
frontier,--so that at one time it held almost complete possession of
France. South of the Pyrenees we find it once more; dominant in
Portugal, less strongly represented in Spain, yet still supplying a
considerable part of the population of the whole peninsula, as it does
in Ireland at the present day. But it does not stop with Spain, or even
Europe. We find the same race again in the Guanches of the Canary
islands, off the African coast; and, stranger still, we find mummies of
this race, of great antiquity, in the cave-tombs of Teneriffe. Further,
we have ample evidence of its presence, until displaced by Moorish
invaders, all along northern Africa as far as Tunis; and we come across
it again amongst the living races in the Mediterranean isles, in
Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy. Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central
Sahara belong to the same type. Everywhere the same tall, dark race,
handsome, imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of
eyes; a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and texture
of hair.
Thus far the southern extension of this, our second Irish race; we may
look for a moment at its distribution in the north. Across the shallow
sea which separates us from Britain we find the same race, clinging
always to the Atlantic seaboard. It dominates south Wales, where its
presence was remarked and commented on by the invading Romans. It is
present elsewhere through the Welsh mountains, and much more sparsely
over the east of England; but we have ample evidence that at one time
this tall, dark race held the whole of England in undisputed possession,
except, perhaps, for a remnant of the Hyperborean dwarfs. In the west of
Scotland, and especially in the Western Isles, it is once more numerous;
and we find offshoots of the same race in the dark-haired
Norwegians,--still holding to the seaboard of the Atlantic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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