Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine
Rhaetia and Pannonia, broad-headed folk, who were in a somewhat lower condition of barbarism than the race whose territory they usurped, restless, assertive, and irritable. Says Beddoe:

    1

   [Note 1: The Anthropological History of Europe, p. 100.]

   “The mass of tall, blond, vigorous barbarians multiplied, seethed, and fretted behind the barrier thus imposed. Tacitus and several other classic authors speak of the remarkable uniformity in their appearance; how they were all tall and handsome, with fierce blue eyes and yellow hair. Humboldt remarks the tendency we all have to see only the single type in a strange foreign people, and to shut our eyes to the differences among them. Thus some of us think sheep all alike, but the shepherd knows better; and many think all Chinamen are alike, whereas they differ, in reality, quite as much as we do, or rather more. But with respect to the ancient Germans, there certainly was among them one very prevalent form of head, and even the varieties of feature which occur among the Marcomans—for example, on Marcus Aurelius’ column—all seem to oscillate round one central type.

   The ‘Graverow’ Type

   “This is the Graverow type of Ecker, the Hohberg type of His and Rutimeyer, the Swiss anatomists. In it the head is long, narrow (say from 70 to 76 in. breadth-index), as high or higher than it is broad, with the upper part of the occiput very prominent, the forehead rather high than broad, often dome-shaped, often receding, with prominent brows, the nose long, narrow, and prominent, the cheek-bones narrow and not prominent, the chin well marked, the mouth apt to be prominent in women. In Germany persons with these characters have almost always light eyes and hair.... This Graverow type is almost exclusively what is found in the burying-places of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, whether of the Alemanni, the Bavarians, the Franks, the Saxons, or the Burgundians. Schetelig dug out a graveyard in Southern Spain which is attributed to the Visigoths. Still the same harmonious elliptic form, the same indices, breadth 73, height 74.”

   Early German Society

   Tacitus in his Germania gives a vivid if condensed picture of Teutonic life in the latter part of the first century:

   “The face of the country, though in some parts varied, presents a cheerless scene, covered with the gloom of forests, or deformed with wide-extended marshes; toward 
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