to the early modifications which
produced what we speak of as racial, linguistic, or even national
peculiarities. That we are English or German, that we are white or
black, nay, if you like, that we are human beings at all, all this has
modified our self, or our germ-plasm, far more powerfully than
anything that can happen to us as individuals now.

When my friends and readers assured me that an account of my early
struggles in the battle of life would be useful to many a young,
struggling man, all I could say was that here again it was really my
friends who did everything for me, and helped me over many a stile,
and many a ditch, nay, without whom I should never have done whatever
I did for the Sciences of Language, of Mythology, and Religion, in
fact for Anthropology in the widest sense of that word. My very
struggles were certainly a help to me, even my opponents were most
useful to me. The subjects on which I wrote had hardly been touched on
in England, at least from the historical point of view which I took,
and I had not only to overcome the indifference of the public, but to
disarm as much as possible the prejudices often felt, and sometimes
expressed also, against anything made in Germany! Now I confess I
could never understand such a prejudice among men of science. Was I
more right or more wrong because I was born in Germany? Is scientific
truth the exclusive property of one nation, of Germany, or of England?
If I say two and two make four in German, is that less true because it
is said by a German? and if I say, no language without thought, no
thought without language, has that anything to do with my native
country? The prejudice against strangers and particularly against
Germans is, no doubt, much stronger now than it was at the time when I
first came to England. I had spent nearly two years in Paris, and
there too there existed then so little of unfriendly feeling towards
Germany, that one of the best reviews to which the rising scholars and
best writers of Paris contributed was actually called _Revue
Germanique_. Who would now venture to publish in Paris such a review
and under such a title? If there existed such an anti-German feeling
anywhere in England when I arrived here in the year 1846, one would
suppose that it existed most strongly at Oxford. And so it did, no
doubt, particularly among theologians. With them German meant much the
same as unorthodox, and unorthodox was enough at that time to taboo a