its family traditions, resenting thereby the interference of
the state in its domestic institutions? A foremost statistical
authority, Jacques Bertillon, has devoted considerable space to proving
that some relation between the two exists. Confronted by the preceding
facts, his explanation is this: that the people of the southern
departments, inconstant perhaps and fickle, nevertheless are quickly
pacified after a passionate outbreak of any kind. Husband and wife may
quarrel, but the estrangement is dissipated before recourse to the law
can take place. On the other hand, the Norman peasant, Teutonic by race,
cold and reserved, nurses his grievances for a long time; they abide
with him, smoldering but persistent. "Words and even blows terminate
quarrels quickly in the south; in the north they are settled by the
judge." From similar comparisons in other European countries, M.
Bertillon draws the final conclusion that the Teutonic race betrays a
singular preference for this remedy for domestic ills. It becomes for
him an ethnic trait.

Another social phenomenon has been laid at the door of the Teutonic race
of northern Europe; one which even more than divorce is directly the
concomitant of modern intellectual and economic progress. We refer to
suicide. Morselli devotes a chapter of his interesting treatise upon
this subject to proving that "the purer the German race--that is to say,
the stronger the Germanism (e.g., Teutonism) of a country--the more it
reveals in its psychical character an extraordinary propensity to
self-destruction."

Consider for a moment the relative frequency of suicide with reference
to the ethnic composition of France. The parallel between the two is
almost exact in every detail. There are again our three areas of Alpine
racial occupation--Savoy, Auvergne, and Brittany--in which suicide falls
annually below seventy-five per million inhabitants. There, again, is
the Rhone Valley and the broad diagonal strip from Paris to Bordeaux,
characterized alike by strong infusion of Teutonic traits and relative
frequency of the same social phenomenon.

Divorce and suicide will serve as examples of the mode of proof adopted
for tracing a number of other social phenomena to an ethnic origin. Thus
Lapouge attributes the notorious depopulation of large areas in France
to the sterility incident upon intermixture between the several racial
types of which the population is constituted. This he seeks to prove
from t