nnumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted that dominion must
once have been. The over-shadowing and far-reaching importance of what
occurred is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the New
Testament was written in Greek; while to the early Christians, North
Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the Valley of the Po.
The intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in the lands for a
period twice as long as that which has elapsed since, with the voyage
of Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have begun; and then
they withered like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion,
and their place knew them no more. They overshadowed the ground; they
vanished; and the old types reappeared in their old homes, with beside
them a new type, the Arab.

Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure of the main
facts. We know that the Hollander remains in Holland, though the
greatness of Holland has passed; we know that the Latin blood remains
in Italy, whether to a greater or less extent; and that the Latin
culture has died out in the African realm it once won, while it has
lasted in Spain and France, and thence has extended itself to
continents beyond the ocean. We may not know the causes of the facts,
save partially; but the facts themselves we do know. But there are
other cases in which we are at present ignorant even of the facts; we
do not know what the changes really were, still less the hidden
causes and meaning of these changes. Much remains to be found out
before we can speak with any certainty as to whether some changes mean
the actual dying out or the mere transformation of types. It is, for
instance, astonishing how little permanent change in the physical
make-up of the people seems to have been worked in Europe by the
migrations of the races in historic times. A tall, fair-haired,
long-skulled race penetrates to some southern country and establishes
a commonwealth. The generations pass. There is no violent revolution,
no break in continuity of history, nothing in the written records to
indicate an epoch-making change at any given moment; and yet after a
time we find that the old type has reappeared and that the people of
the locality do not substantially differ in physical form from the
people of other localities that did not suffer such an invasion. Does
this mean that gradually the children of the invaders have dwindled
and died out; or, as the blood is mixed with the ancie