A PERSISTENT TYPE 259 



the absorbers were in their turn absorbed by another 

 blue-eyed race ; and these by still another or by others. 

 The only explanation appears to be that this type is 

 persistent beyond all others, and that a very little black 

 blood, after being mixed and re-mixed with blonde for 

 centuries, even for hundreds of generations, may, when- 

 ever the right conditions occur, reproduce the vanished 

 type in its original form. 



Time brings about its revenges in many strange ways : 

 we see that there is a continuous and an increasing 

 migration from Wales and the Highlands into all the 

 big towns in England, and this large and growing Celtic 

 element will undoubtedly have a great effect on the 

 population in time, making it less Saxon and more 

 Celtic than it has been these thousand years past and 

 upwards. But in all the people, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, 

 Dane, or what not, there is that older constituent 

 infinitely older and perhaps infinitely more persistent ; 

 and this too, albeit in a subtler way, may be working 

 in us to recover its long-lost world. That it has gone 

 far in this direction in Spain, where the blue eye is 

 threatened with extinction, and in the greater portion 

 if not all, of France, there appears to be some evidence 

 to show. Here, where the Neolithic people were more 

 nearly exterminated and the remnant more completely 

 absorbed, the return may be very much slower. But 

 when we find, as we do in Hampshire and many other 

 counties, that this constituent in the blood of the 

 people, after mixture for untold ages with so many 



