into populous parts, gave battle to the rightful owners, robbed and murdered them when strong enough to do so, and cheated them when they were not powerful enough to trust to force. Yet while all this was happening there were millions of acres of fine meadow-land and river-bank, of mines and forests, lying ready for the axe and plough. It was not mere pressure at home, for in many cases they never rested long enough in any spot to over-people it; and how little this must actuate people indisposed to wander we may see in such lands as China and Japan, Russia and Hindostan, where scarcely any motive has for centuries proved powerful enough to induce the people to leave. In China the most appalling poverty has till lately found no better outlet than crime; nothing but eviction has driven the starving Celt from the highlands and Ireland; the strong and ruthless policy of conquest and force has alone expelled the red indian from the hunting grounds of his ancestors.

They could have done

Take for example the case of the phoenicians. They came away from the land of gold-dust and ivory, of the myrrh and the gum-tree, the home of the camel and antelope, with which all their grand traditions were bound up, to seek tin in Cornwall and amber in the cold and distant Baltic. perfectly well without these things, but even supposing they were necessary, the motive that prompted them, strangers from almost tropic lands, to settle in distant parts of Ireland and England, when both Tyre and Carthage viewed emigration of their subjects with the same cold and sullen distrust as Japan or Russia do, seems utterly inexplicable. I can only

assume that it was some extraordinary instinct which impelled them to this step; indeed, if we look at the vast extent over which the four great wandering races spread, if we remember that in many parts of their journeys not a road existed, mark or object of any kind except the

nor a land

stars and the sun, that hunger and thirst, cold and danger were ever before them, I think it must be admitted that nothing in the history of the world equals these undertakings.

However my object here is not so much to ask what reasons impelled them to these migrations, as to inquire how far these migrations themselves may have affected the battle of life among men. There is a very prevalent belief that many lands now thickly peopled were entirely colonized by roaming tribes, and that their offspring exist in a mixed form of some kind or other. For instance it seems to be quite taken for granted that some of these people, scythians and phoenicians, landed in Britain, and that their blood still survives mixed with that of danes and frisians, celts and anglo-saxons. My own belief is that such a thing is simply impossible, that a mixed race cannot long survive, and that even a pure race, except in the circle or area for which it was originally adapted or created, is not more likely to stand its ground; that colonies from it, unless they be supplied with fresh blood from the mother country, so soon as they are left to themselves sink into anarchy and decay; arts and sciences flourish no more, language and blood become mongrel, all principles of morality are lost, and in the end the people exterminate or so weaken each other, that

often the original holders of the soil recover possession of it.

Now that he is gone men are beginning to see that Knox was right. He pointed to the swift and sure decay in physique of the anglo-saxon in America.* He showed that two opposite races will never bow to the same rule, and that sooner or later they will part, as Belgium has done from Holland and Lombardy from Austria; that race is eternal, blood unalterable. He might almost as well have lectured to the winds, but that his bold predictions and strong original views were based on truth, will be seen when men trust more to nature and less to the tales of old chroniclers.

The mestizos of Lima, born of a white father and an indian mother, and the canadian half-breeds, are scarcely ever found possessed of the least independence or resolution of character.† Sometimes the mestizos are endowed with strength and endurance, but the canadian half-breeds often lose even this. The mulattoes bear fatigue worse than either the whites or the blacks" and are the shortest-lived of the human race (!), the women are very delicate and subject to a variety of chronic disorders; they are liable to abortions and their children die young." race soon overpowers the other. If the child of a black father and white mother marry a black, in two generations the form and features of the mother are lost. Humboldt says that when a mestizo marries a white man, the second generation differs hardly

The Races of Man.

+ Wilson's Prehistoric Man, Vol. II., p. 344.

Lectures on Physiology, by Mr. Lawrence.

One

anything from the European race. Speedy and inevitable decay attends the union of the dutchman with the caffir, and the englishman with the east indian.

This I believe would always be found the case could we trace history closely and accurately enough. The warlike tribes which have from time to time poured over parts of Europe have often appeared in numbers enough to overwhelm any force the invaded people could bring against them; they have held the country with a strong hand and have used all the merciless defences of tyranny; yet they have no more been able to abide than the clouds; they have no more swept away or permanently altered the people they oppressed and kept under, than a storm destroys the elements amid which it rages. They have stirred the face of things and passed away again. The croat is only encamped in Italy, as the turk is in Turkey, and the savage russian in Poland, and as the moor once was in Spain and the roman in England. Withdraw them, give the original race room to spring up again and they will cover the soil as fast as a garden or park left to lie waste will be covered by indigenous plants.

I know that the very opposite opinion has been long held and that it more naturally suggests itself. When a tribe of danes glutted with blood and plunder had settled in the land, what more likely than that their descendants should endure in it as well as those of the people they vanquished? When peace succeeded to the war of invasion, what more natural than marriages between families seated near each other? The young who loved, even if of opposite nations, would care little for the strife of their fathers. Then what holds good of

the dane must of the roman, the phoenician, and the scythian. I answer, it does not; the evidence of history cannot decide a question of natural science; the testimony of names of families and customs, of language and worship, though a great historian has told us it is the best we can have, is a mere nothing in the scale against the exact teachings of zoology. Customs are things of a day, and names and language perish in a century; the celt speaks the tongue of the hated saxon; the netherlander is weaning himself from low dutch in favour of french; the blondhaired briton worshipped the same godt on CadderIdris as the red indian on the table lands of Mexico, and the dusky indian at Bhaugulpore. No doubt mixed races would be prolific for a time, the question is whether the indigenous race does not incessantly tend to regain the ascendant. In a century after the romans were gone England was purely english again. The third generation of english after the norman invasion was almost wholly english except in those families who maintained the race pure by marrying only with fresh blood from Normandy, and they soon died out. We hear of our being a mixed race, but when is the roman head, or the norman face seen in really english families?

The englishman is not the saxon, he lived here ages before the saxon was known, and is just as likely as the saxon to have had a language of his own. The whole tale of the saxon invasion is such a monstrous absurdity that one can only rank it with the old wars of Rome taken bodily from the histories

* Hume.

+ Belus, the god of the sun.