72 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



mixture of the Romanized Gauls with the vigorous 

 Teutonic tribes that overran the Roman provinces. 

 Northern lands that had never seen the Roman eagles, 

 or from which they had retreated, were developing a 

 culture and even a literature of their own, on which 

 Roman ideas and Roman civilization only acted as 

 external and foreign influences. 



We have said that it is to the different branches 

 of the Northern race that modern science is mainly 

 The Coming due. Even in Ital Y when, first of nations, 

 of the North, the Renaissance touched her, experi- 

 mental science took its rise in the Northern regions 

 which had been permeated with streams of barbarian 

 blood by the influx of Goth and Lombard. Hence, 

 for our present purpose, it is well to learn what we can 

 of the religion and racial characters of those folk 

 with whose achievements we shall almost exclusively 

 be concerned in our later chapters. 



Once more, as in the case of the Greeks, we may see 

 the genius of a people shadowed forth in their religion 

 and mythology. The heathen faith of Gaul and 

 Germany and Britain disappeared on contact with 

 Christianity, leaving well-nigh no trace. But Scandi- 

 navia kept its native gods far longer long enough for 

 poetry, freed from religious prejudices, while deposing 

 the gods, to retain the myths, and to enshrine them 

 for ever in the deathless tales of the North. The 

 Icelandic edda of Snorri Sturlusen was written about 

 1222 in prose, but it contained quotations in verse from 

 heathen poems, some of which have survived in an 

 older edda. In these poems we catch glimpses of 

 generation behind generation, back into the dim 



