r form of bones I do not think a practised
craniologist could distinguish the skulls and bones found in an ancient
Saxon cemetery in Surrey from the remains of a Celtic grave in
Connemara, so much are Celtic and Saxon types alike. Were we to dress
one group of fishermen from the coast of Norfolk and another from the
shores of Connaught in the same garb, I do not think there is an
anthropologist in Europe who by mere inspection could tell the Irish
from the English group. From a physical point of view the Celt and Saxon
are one; whatever be the source of their mutual antagonism, it does not
lie in a difference of race. It is often said that we British are a
mixed and mongrel collection of types and breeds; the truth is that as
regards physical type the inhabitants of the British Isles are the most
uniform of all the large nationalities of Europe.

ALL BRITISH NATIONALITIES ARE OF THE NORTH SEA STOCK

The statement which I have just made, that Britons are really a uniform
folk, seems altogether at variance with the teaching of history. What I
am to say now will explain a discrepancy which, in its essence, is only
superficial. Our written history opens with the Roman invasion and
occupation of Britain; it was an 'occupation' or 'plantation', not a
true colonization. On the other hand, the Saxon and Danish invasions
ended in widely spread and true colonizations of Britain. The Norman
invasion, on the other hand, was of the nature of a plantation. I will
make the difference between the various forms of invasion apparent
presently. There have been, too, flocks of immigrant refugees at various
times. We have the most positive evidence that long before the dawn of
written history the processes of invasion and colonization had been
going on in Britain. In all these invasions, historic and prehistoric,
with one important exception, no strange or new racial stock was added
to the British Isles; all were apparently branches of the human stock
which still occupy the north-west of Europe--men of the Nordic type--or
as I should prefer to call them, the North Sea breed. We are only now
beginning to realize that even at the dawn of the present period, a
period marked by the retreat of the ice sheet from the Baltic basin, the
seashore and the sea itself were the high roads along which primitive
peoples migrated and spread. They were people of the same human type
who spread themselves along the shores of the Mediterranean and occupied