ETHNOLOGY. Of the so-called earliest Paleo lithic epochs or eultnre stages of Europe there are no relics in Italy. Exceptional finds belong ing to later periods oeeur north of the Po. The northern slopes of the Apennines are said to he rich in chipped implements called coups do poing, which correspond to the chipped disks found in Ohio mounds. Scrapers also abound, and leaf shaped objects of Solutri.;an type, but little of the later Paleolithie form. In places favorable to such life cave-dwelling is not without its witnesses. The stone-workers of the earliest human occupation of Italy were followed in the Neolithic period by doliehocephalic pottery makers and builders of pile dwellings on the lakes of the northern horderland, and by mound-builders in the I'o Valley. who on the marshy lowlands built tumuli, called terra mare (q.v.), with level tops, and on them erected dwellings and villages, which were pro tected by ditches. The germ of Italian culture lay in this epoch. The peoples were many, though in the regions separated by the Po they belonged to only two races. Industrialism had taken the place of savagery. The polished axe, the scraper, weights. and spindles of terra-cotta. coarse and fine pottery, slate ornamented with etchittgs. toilet articles and domestic utensils of bone and antler, linen fabrics. acorns. hazelnuts, and seeds of flax, wheat, barley, poppies, and apples, all show that a mixed people then existed. Italian antiquities cannot be classified rigidly by means of those in France or other European countries. There are three reasons for this. In the first place, the progress of industrialism depends on physical geography in its widest sense. As no two areas are alike in this respect, no two culture growths can be identical. In the second place, the primitive inhabitants of Italy, though they may show racial traits of early peoples of France and the Balkan Peninsula, had their own varietal peculiarities. In the third
place, the pedagogic influence of outside sugges tions cannot be the same with any two races, however small an area they may occupy. In the product of activity there will be a mixture of ingredients, the one furnished by the people accultured, the other by their foreign teachers. The most ancient peoples of Italy known to the historian belonged to a dolichocephalic race. They may be classed in the Mediterranean species end called Ligurians. They were akin to the Iberians of Spain and the Pelasgians of Greece, a colony of whom, greatly modified by local mixture, became Etruscans. Toward the close of the Neolithic period there came into the north of Italy a. brachyeephalie people who brought with them copper, and occupied most of the I'o Valley, founding there the Umbrian dominion. This short-headed race modified the biological characters, the customs, and the speech of this northern region. Thus arose a sharp division of the Peninsula into two distinct ethnic areas, that of the broad-headed Alpine or Celtic type of Central Europe. north of the _Apennines, and the true long-headed Mediterranean or Ligurian type in the smith. Later on appearel the tall, blond race from what is now the German Empire, and from the regions farther east, Chu bri, Goths. Visigoths, Saxons. and Lombards. These conquerors were long-headed also, like the Pelasgians. They did not pro foundly modify the physical characters of the population. The skulls of the peoples along the Po are varied from place to place. Biologically the two divisions of Italy exist as they did be fore the Teutonic invasions. Venetians are 1.666 meters or (15.5 inches in stature, and the propor tion of head-width to bead-length anion!! the Piedmontese is .86. In the other ethnological division of Italy. Sardinian soldiers are only 1.619 meters or 63.68 inches in stature, and the ratio of head-width to head-length is .77.