438 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



the organized masses of great empires at their com- 

 mand, and the invaded mountaineers could not retreat 

 towards the east. This stem of nations was, as it still 

 is, the tall, fair, light, or red haired portion of the 

 Caucasian type, including the giant races of historical 

 tradition. It ventured, in the remotest ages, in small 

 clans, or by mere families, to penetrate far among the 

 dark haired nations, unsupported by numbers, and 

 trusting solely to their fortitude and valour. The 

 Mongolic, the Ural Altaic Finns, and the Indo Arab 

 nations, have at all times acted by the weight of over- 

 whelming numbers, therein differing from the fair 

 haired tribes of mixed and of pure Caucasians, whose 

 cool energy and self reliance, not only takes little ac- 

 count of numbers, but actually is the cause of small sove- 

 reignties, and even permanent republics, remaining in- 

 dependent to this day. We have in more than one place 

 pointed out families, and clans of this great stem, assum- 

 ing the absolute mastery of swarthy and of dark haired 

 nations, or becoming in a collective form the nobility, 

 the privileged class, wherever they resided. An ele- 

 ment of this kind, either in part Finnic, or purely 

 Getic, blended in the earliest population of Greece, 

 probably before the formation of the kingdom of 

 Argos, eighteen centuries before the Christian era. 

 The Heraclidae were of the fair haired stock, and so 

 was Theseus, and indeed most of the demigod heroes 

 of Greece ; at least that opinion in tradition is equiva- 

 lent to an admission of the fact, that the northern race 



