The provinces of Nordic and Mediterranean races are widely separated by the mountain zone in Central Europe, but in the west they grade into one another, and here the old long-headed type has become neither purely Nordic nor purely Mediterranean. Especially in Britain, of old a refuge of the past off the shores of Europe, Aurignacian types have persisted markedly, and this is still more noteworthy in Ireland. The mass of the population of our islands is long-headed and intermediate in character between the two differentiated races, tall, gaunt, and dark in parts of {14} the Scottish Highlands and North Wales, short and almost Mediterranean in parts of South Wales and Ireland, and 'betwixt and between' almost everywhere. Probably almost every hundred, not to say every parish, of the British Isles has examples of these Intermediate Types, as well, of course, as of Nordics due to immigrations from Scandinavia and the Baltic. The broad-heads of the mountain axis of Central Europe are technically called the Alpine race. They are distinguished by a thick-set appearance, rather straight brown or chestnut hair, grey to brown eyes, often a dry whitish skin, a short face, a moderate nose, sometimes pointing out rather markedly. In the Illyrian Alps and parts of the Carpathians, and stretching from the latter, on the south side of the Pripet Marshes away into Muscovy, this stock is often tall and dark. In the Swiss and French Alps it is rather short and stocky. In the Balkan Peninsula it is often characterized by a flattening of the back of the very high and short head; in the west the tendency is rather towards general rounding of the head. It is interesting to notice from the above that the main facts of distribution of race type in Europe probably date from the beginning of the Neolithic Age, the period of ultimate recession of the great Ice Sheets. In the subsequent ages there has probably been modification of the race types to some extent, but the main facts of distribution of human stocks in Europe became settled in that early time. Some of the modifications of this scheme must be noticed briefly.