s repeated mixtures since the beginning of the world. If
we think of the early migrations of mankind; of the battles fought before
there were hieroglyphics to record them; of conquests, leadings into
captivity, piracy, slavery, and colonization, all without a sacred poet to
hand them down to posterity,--we shall hesitate, indeed, to speak of pure
races, or unmixed blood, even at the very dawn of real history. Little as
we know of the early history of Greece, we know enough to warn us against
looking upon the Greeks of Asia or Europe as an unmixed race. AEgyptus,
with his Arabian, Ethiopian, and Tyrian wives; Cadmus, the son of Libya;
Phoenix, the father of Europa,--all point to an intercourse of Greece with
foreign countries, whatever else their mythological meaning may be. As
soon as we know anything of the history of the world, we know of wars and
alliances between Greeks and Lydians and Persians, of Phoenician
settlements all over the world, of Carthaginians trading in Spain and
encamped in Italy, of Romans conquering and colonizing Gaul, Spain,
Britain, the Danubian Principalities and Greece, Western Asia and Northern
Africa. Then again, at a later time, follow the great ethnic convulsions
of Eastern Europe, and the devastation and re-population of the ancient
seats of civilization by Goths, and Lombards, and Vandals, and Saxons;
while at the same time, and for many centuries to come, the few
strongholds of civilization in the East were again and again overwhelmed
by the irresistible waves of Hunnish, Mongolic, and Tartaric invaders.
And, with all this, people at the latter end of the nineteenth century
venture to speak, for instance, of pure Norman blood as something definite
or definable, forgetting how the ancient Norsemen carried their wives away
from the coasts of Germany or Russia, from Sicily or from the very Piraeus;
while others married whatever wives they could find in the North of
France, whether of Gallic, Roman, or German extraction, and then settled
in England, where they again contracted marriages with Teutonic, Celtic,
or Roman damsels. In our own days, if we see the daughter of an English
officer and an Indian Ranee married to the son of a Russian nobleman, how
are we to class the offspring of that marriage? The Indian Ranee may have
had Mongol blood, so may the Russian nobleman; but there are other
possible ingredients of pure Hindu and pure Slavonic, of Norman, German,
and Roman blood,--and who is th