lood. If the
word "race" does not mean community of blood, it is hard to see what it
does mean. Yet it is certain that there can be no positive proof of
real community of blood, even among those groups of mankind which we
instinctively speak of as families and races. It is not merely that
the blood has been mingled in after-times; there is no positive proof
that there was any community of blood in the beginning. No living
Englishman can prove with absolute certainty that he comes in the male
line of any of the Teutonic settlers in Britain in the fifth or sixth
centuries. I say in the male line, because anyone who is descended
from any English king can prove such descent, though he can prove it
only through a long and complicated web of female successions. But we
may be sure that in no other case can such a pedigree be proved by the
kind of proof which lawyers would require to make out the title to an
estate or a peerage. The actual forefathers of the modern Englishman
may chance to have been, not true-born Angles or Saxons, but Britons,
Scots, in later days Frenchmen, Flemings, men of any other nation who
learned to speak English and took to themselves English names. But
supposing that a man could make out such a pedigree, supposing that he
could prove that he came in the male line of some follower of Hengest
or Cerdic, he would be no nearer to proving original community of blood
either in the particular Teutonic race or in the general Aryan family.
If direct evidence is demanded, we must give up the whole doctrine of
families and races, as far as we take language, manners, institutions,
anything but physical conformation, as the distinguishing marks of
races and families. That is to say, if we wish never to use any word
of whose accuracy we cannot be perfectly certain, we must leave off
speaking of races and families at all from any but the purely physical
side. We must content ourselves with saying that certain groups of
mankind have a common history, that they have languages, creeds, and
institutions in common, but that we have no evidence whatever to show
how they came to have languages, creeds, and institutions in common.
We cannot say for certain what was the tie which brought the members of
the original group together, any more than we can name the exact time
and the exact place when and where they came together.

We may thus seem to be landed in a howling wilderness of scientific
uncertainty. The resu