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having received any appreciable admixture of its blood; just as, for example, the pure-blooded negroes of the West Indies and the Southern States speak no tongue but English, Creole French, or Spanish. So, again, English has become the language of Ireland, without interfering to any large degree with the Celtic nationality of the people; indeed, writers who talk about the Anglo-Saxon race' in America and the colonies forget that the Anglo-Saxon who emigrates is generally either an Irishman, a Welshman, or a Highland Scot, without prejudice to the chance of his being a Cornish miner or a Celtic Yorkshireman. Through these Anglicised Celts, the English language has taken possession of North America, South Africa, and Australasia ; not only is it swallowing up the French of Canada or Louisiana, the Spanish of California or New Mexico, and the Dutch of the Cape, but in the New World it has blotted out the African and Indian tongues, and is assimilating in the second generation the German, Scandinavian, Russian, and Italian immigrants. Your true New Englander is not a prolific father, like the German or the Irishman; and I believe myself that the proportion of Anglo-Saxondom in the America of our day has been grossly over-rated. 'Anglo-Celtic' is perhaps the truest description of the British nationality.

One of the greatest surprises of modern discovery in ethnical and linguistic science is similarly the overthrow of the Great Chinese Fallacy. Time was when the remote antiquity of China and Chinese civilisation was an article of faith for European scholars. It was believed that the yellow man had developed his own culture, such as it is, independently for himself, in the far east of Asia. He was the pioneer in writing, printing, and the use of gunpowder. But now Chinese scholars have shown us, alas! that China really derived its civilisation, like all the rest of us, by indirect steps, from Babylonia and Egypt. M. Terrien de Lacouperie first demonstrated the fact that long before the ancestors of the Celestial race reached the middle kingdom which they now inhabit, by the Hoang-Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang, they lived in close contact with that ancient civilised people, the Akkadians of Babylonia. From the wise men of Akkad they learned the rudiments of their arts; and when they set forth from Mesopotamia, a little horde of Bak tribes, on their long journey eastward, they carried with them both the early elements of Akkadian science, and the words and phrases of the Akkadian language. They reached China with letters, astronomy, and arts ready-made, and they have done little since but live on the

raditions of their far-western ancestors. The truth is, for the astern hemisphere at least, there is but one civilisation, which began in Egypt and the Euphrates valley, and spread in either lirection, eastward to Persia, India, and China, or westward to Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and the Atlantic.

Even the Chinese language turns out, on examination, to be just the opposite of what earlier investigators thought it. Elder philologists took it for granted that primitive tongues must have been monosyllabic; and since Chinese is monosyllabic, they regarded it, somewhat illogically, as therefore primitive. But Terrien de Lacouperie and Douglas have shown, on the contrary, that Chinese is really Akkadian by origin, and that it was once polysyllabic, like most other languages. Its words have been shortened by wear and tear, or by that familiar process which turns omnibus into bus,' photograph into photo,' and bicycle into 'bike.' It consists of words said 'for short,' like the common abbreviation of William into Bill, Richard into Dick, or Theodore into Theo; or rather, it has suffered by that imperceptible phonetic change which has reduced eleemosyne to 'alms,' semetipsissimum to même, and Aethelthryth to Awdry. In fact, it turns out that Chinese, instead of being one of the most primitive languages, is really one of the most worn and degraded. In place of psychology' it would content itself with psy; while tel or pho would do duty for telephone.'

In this case, the diffusion of a language and a culture is by simple migration, as in the well-known instances of Tyre and Carthage, of Greece and Sicily, of England and America. In other cases, the diffusion is rather by conquest, as in the equally well-known instances of Alexander's successors, of the Roman Empire, and of the Arabs in Egypt, North Africa, and Syria. Greek, Latin, and Arabic, with their accompanying arts, became naturalised among the subject peoples. Most often, it is the conquerors who thus impose their language on the conquered; we need go no further afield than Wales or Ireland, where the process is incomplete, and Cornwall, where it reached its termination a century ago. But sometimes it is the conquered who absorb and assimilate the conquerors; the Normans seem to have been good hands at thus losing their identity wherever they went; for in Normandy, they dropped their native Scandinavian and adopted old French; while in England again they lost their French, and in a few generations became thorough-going Englishmen. In Ireland, too, as an Irishman expressed it, they inculcated Celtic

habits,' and gave rise to the famous saying, so often repeated, that they were 'ipsis Hibernis Hiberniores.'

On a large scale, this absorption of the conquerors by the conquered appears to have gone on over the entire Malayo-Polynesian region. It is curious that over this wide area from Madagascar to Hawaii only one type of language is spoken by the remotest islanders, belonging to all races, and having attained the most varied degrees of culture. The black and woolly-haired Melanesians of the South Pacific Islands, the warlike Maories of New Zealand, the gentle, brown Polynesians, the yellow Mongoloid and Mahommedan people of Java, the dark and half negrolike Malagasy of Madagascar, all speak varieties of this widely diffused language. At one time it was supposed that the Malays, those active Vikings of the far east, had carried their own tongue to these remote places; but then, as Mr. A. H. Keane has pointed out, Malay itself is not the most primitive, but the latest and most developed member of the group. It answers to French rather than to Latin; it is like modern Danish rather than modern Icelandic. The truth seems to be, as Mr. Keane suggests, that the language in question is a very old one, originally belonging to the true Polynesians. Before their arrival the Pacific isles were peopled by the low black race whom we call Melanesians. Many of the archipelagoes, however, were afterwards conquered and colonised by the lighter and essentially Caucasian people, closely akin to our own, whom we call Polynesians. These white Polynesians intermixed and intermarried more or less with the black Melanesians, remaining relatively pure and light-coloured in a few of the archipelagoes, while in others they acquired such an infusion of black blood as made them in time dark brown or H copper-coloured. They imposed their own speech upon the black people everywhere, exactly as the English have imposed the tongue of Shakespeare and Newton upon the rude American and West Indian negroes. In the remotest and blackest islands, Mr. Keane points out, the oldest and crudest form of the common language survives, just as the ancient Scandinavian of the Sagas survives in Iceland; in the more advanced light-brown Polynesian groups, it has been improved and simplified into a more modernised form, just as in Europe the ancient Scandinavian has been improved and simplified into modern Danish and modern Swedish. Finally, at a still later period, the Polynesian tongue was adopted by the yellowish Mongoloid Malays, who conquered the same region, and who further improved and simplified it into the Malay

of commerce, as the Normans did with the English of King Alfred. Unfortunately, however, the languages in the lump are generally called Malayan, after the latest people who adopted them, instead of Polynesian, after their original speakers; which is somewhat the same error as if we were to describe English as the Norman tongue, or speak of Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese as belonging to the French Canadian group of languages.

The fact is, we have to recognise that changes such as those which we know to have taken place during the historical period also took place in prehistoric times and in unhistoric countries. Just as the English now colonise the coasts of the world, from Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, to South Africa, Canada, British Columbia, and Demerara, so the Phoenician and the Malay colonised in earlier times the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean, and so the Melanesian in a very remote past spread across the Pacific in the frailest of vessels. And just as the Goth and Hun and Tartar swept down in historic times on the Roman Empire or the Asiatic world, so, long before, unknown migrations and unnamed hordes of savages swept down upon Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. For the historic periods and places, we have documentary evidence; for the prehistoric or unhistoric, we have but the evidence of the existing and resultant arrangements.

Even these, however, tell us a great deal. What, for example, can be more curious than the existing diffusion of that tiny black 'Negrito' race, with woolly hair and very protruding jaws, which is now in all probability the earliest surviving variety of the human species? These pygmies occur in Africa as the dwarfs of the forest country, the Akkas, Wochuas, and others, barely four feet high; as the Batwas and Bushmen of the south; and less pure, as the Hottentots. They crop up again in the undersized aborigines of the Andaman Islands of the Gulf of Bengal, in the Negritoes of the Philippines, and in the small black Papuans. Hence we are justified in concluding that this widespread halfdeveloped race of dwarfs once covered a large part of the southern world, from which it has now been ousted by newer, bigger, and more developed tribes; while the primitive pygmies hold their own best either in a few remote islands, in a few barren deserts, or else in very dense and pathless forests, through which taller races. would creep with difficulty.

Not less interesting than these romances of race as race are the romances of the interaction of race and religion, or of race and culture. For example, the Moors of the towns and of the sea-coast

in North Africa, largely intermixed as they are with Arab and other Semitic blood, have swallowed Islam entire, adopting not only its religion but also its social order—its polygamy, its harems, its veiling of women. The Kabyles and Berbers of the hills, on the other hand, fairly pure descendants of the old native Mauretanian or Romanised inhabitants, though they have accepted Mohammedanism more or less fervently as a religious faith, have never really assimilated it as a social system. To this day they are practically strict monogamists; their women do not veil, but freely show their extremely pretty and piquant faces; while the family is organised on much the same basis as in Europe generally. In other words, the racial habit of allowing a certain freedom and independence to women has proved stronger in practice than the law of Islam; the intrusive Semite has not been able to inoculate with his ideas the Hamitic North African. Nor in Aryan' Persia, again, has the prohibition against wine been so successful as elsewhere; while the native artistic and pictorial spirit of the Persian race has made a dead letter of the restriction against fashioning an image of anything that is in heaven above, or in earth beneath, or in the waters that are under the earth. Race, in short, has proved stronger than religion. For the Persians are Shiahs, not orthodox Sunnis; they have transformed the materialistic tenets of Islam into a mysticism not far removed from that of India or the Buddhists. Who could mistake Omar Khayyam for a mere Mahommedan ?

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Very similar ethnical diversities of faith may also be noticed in our own islands. The Anglican church, as a rule, has firmly established itself in the more Teutonic and south-eastern half of Britain alone. The Gaelic Celts, both in Ireland and the Scotch Highlands, have remained Roman Catholic; the Cymric Celts, both in Wales and Cornwall, have adopted Wesleyanism or some emotional form of Protestant nonconformity. Even in England proper it will be found that the Establishment flourishes best in the Teutonic south-east, while dissent is rife in the half-Celtic north, in the Yorkshire dales, in Lancashire, and in the West-country. I may add, side by side with these facts, that poets, musicians, and painters spring most frequently in Britain from the Celtic or semi-Celtic north and west, while they are rarer in the Teutonic or Teutonised south and east. Vocalists, in particular, are very frequently Welsh. Even in London, that vast congeries of mingled races, it is not without reason that nonconformity is led by Cambrians like the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes,