Two other sects that are now to be mentioned, the Druses and the Maronites, show in the same way how religious seclusion tends to preserve old physical types.

P. DRUSES.

In the south of Beyrout a great part of the Lebanon and Antilibanos country is inhabited by about 150,000 Druses, who down to our days are to a certain extent independent of the Ottoman Government and enjoy a good many privileges.

Their secret creed has been studied best by S. de Sacy in 1838,1 and contains, mixed with Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan elements, a great many pantheistic conceptions, together with curious ideas on metempsychosis and the repeated incarnation of God, and with remains of the old Oriental worship of Nature. They speak Arabic and pass officially as "Mohammedans," having Islamic names, but they have no inner connection with the religion of Mohammet. Max v. Oppenheim 2 believes the Druses to be the descendants of "Arabs," immigrated about A. D. 800.

This hypothesis probably conforms to local tradition, but is in direct contradiction to the general impression we get from Druses and from Arabs, and from the result of anthropometric researches. I measured 59 adult male Druses, and not one single man fell, as regards his cephalic index, within the range of the real Arab.

The Druses are all hyper-brachycephalic, with an index oscillating, like that of the Bektash, between 84 and 89 only, with one single exception, an old mischievous and half idiotic pensioner, who pretended to have once been first keeper of the Imperial Plate in Constantinople, and to be a real incarnation of Ali. His index was 76 without a suspicion of synostotic sutures; but he had gray eyes, and fell in many other respects so fully out of the line of the homogeneous rest of my Druses, that it seems safe to drop him entirely. The index of the auricular height ranges from 74 to 84 and the facial index from 79 to 92, with a distinct maximum of 86, with 14 men in 58.

Q. MARONITES.

The northern neighbors of the Druses are the Maronites, Christians, generally said to be the descendants of a Monophysite sect, separated from the common Christian Church after the Council of Chalcedon in A. D. 451. Now, this council is certainly of the very greatest importance for ecclesiastical history, as it caused the schism between the Oriental world and the Occidental: the Greek, the Armenian, and the Coptic Church separated from the Roman, because the simple understanding and the sound common sense of the Orientals preferred

1 Exposé de la religion des Druses, vol. 2, Paris, 1838.

Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf, Berlin, D. Reimer, 1899, vol. 1, p. iii ss.

to accept only one nature in Jesus Christ. But this theological dispute gave the name to the Maronites, for they chose a monk, John Maro, to be their bishop after they separated from Rome, but their physical qualities are much older than their religious schism. Indeed, partly through their isolation in the mountains, partly through their not intermarrying with their Mohammedan or Druse neighbors, the Maronites of to-day have preserved an old type in an almost marvelous purity. In no other Oriental group is there a greater number of men with extreme height of the skull and excessive flattening of the occipital region than among the Maronites. They are the best specimens of what C. Toldt1 calls "planoccipital" formation, and very often their occiput is so steep that one is again and again inclined to think of artificial deformation. Indeed I took great care to make sure of this point and examined nearly a hundred babies in their cradles, to ascertain whether or not a particular way of laying the child's head on a cushion might perhaps influence the form of the occiput. No such possibility was found, and we are constrained to regard the extreme "planoccipital" formation of the Maronites (and their relations) as a natural character. Cf. the two types here (pl. 3.) I have measured 20 adult males, mostly from Baalbek and from Tarabolus. Their cephalic index ranged from 79 to 91 with an arithmetic mean of 86. The average facial index was 89, the irregular indices running from 75 to 94, with four cases of 87. All were dark. Having thus treated of a series of smaller groups, we can now proceed to the five great groups of western Asia-Persians, Arabs, Turks, Greeks, and Armenians.

R. PERSIANS.

Notwithstanding some recent researches, our knowledge of the anthropology of Persia is rather scanty. In a land inhabited by about 10,000,000, not more than 20 or 30 men have been regularly measured, and not one skull has been studied.

Apart from Kurds, Arabs, and Armenians, each numbering from 200,000 to 300,000 souls, and smaller groups of Nestorians, Lurs, Gypsies, etc., there are two large ethnical groups in Persia, the Shiite and settled Tajik and the Sunnite and essentially nomadic Ihlat. The latter are Turkomans and so is the actual Dynasty of the Kajar; the Ihlat, being the energetic and vigorous element, are the real masters of the land and of the Tajik, the descendants of the old Persians and Medes. But long-continued intermarriage has produced a great many mixed types. Thus the Kajars have sometimes the high aquiline noses quite foreign to real Turkomans.

The old type seems to be preserved in the Parsi, the descendants of Persians who emigrated to India after the battle of Nahauband

"Untersuchungen über die Brachycephalie der Alpenländischen Bevölkerung," in Mitteilungen der Wiener anthropol. Gesell., vol. 40, 1910, p. 69 ss. and p. 197 ss.