Much careful painstaking work by continental anthropologists seems to have proved that a change of racial composition through internal selection has been and still is going on in both the German and French people. The facts have been worked out by O. Ammon[126], Hensen and De Lapouge[127]. They show, chiefly by means of the comparison of the forms of large numbers of skulls, that throughout the historic period the French and German peoples have been becoming more and more round headed, that the type of _Homo Alpinus_, the short dark round-headed race, has been gaining upon the type of _Homo Europaeus_. We have seen that the latter stock of the fair northern type constituted the upper class among the Gauls of Caesar’s time; and the invasions of Franks and Normans must have added considerably to their numbers; yet, in spite of that, the mental and physical characters of this race are said by these authors to be now very much rarer than formerly, owing to the internal selections which have favoured the Alpine type. These took the following forms. In the first place, in the early Middle Ages, it is said, the Nordic type, being a military aristocracy, suffered, as in ancient Greece, proportionally far greater losses in warfare than the Alpine type. Secondly, the severe persecutions of Protestants in France drove into exile, besides killing many others, large numbers who were for the most part of the fair race, because, as we have seen, this race does not easily remain content within the Roman Church. It is said, for example, that, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, so large a number of Protestants passed into Prussia that the rise of Prussia as a powerful State was the immediate consequence, with of course an equivalent loss to France. De Lapouge considers this the greatest blow that France has suffered in the historic period. Normandy alone, it is reported, sent 200,000 Protestants to Prussia. But the most important and curious factor has been, according to De Lapouge, what he calls the selection by towns. He shows, by comparison of masses of anthropological observations, that the Nordic type has been predominantly attracted to the towns (which fact he attributes to their more restless enterprising character) while the dark type has been more content to lead the quiet agricultural life[128]. He points out that the town-life stimulates to a new struggle for adaptation, from which differentiation of classes results; the longheads maintain their numbers better and rise in the social scale. Further, he shows that town-life makes against fertility, owing to a number of psychological influences—the stimulation of ambition and of the intellect, the luxurious habits, the weakening of family life, the break with the past and its family traditions, the uncertainty of the future, the weakening of religious sanctions; and he gives reason to believe that in this way the towns have been, through