214 NATURE STUDIES. 



contributed, and whereabouts their representatives 

 are now mainly to be found. Of course, in such an 

 inquiry we can only arrive at very approximate 

 results, for in our present advanced stage of inter- 

 mixture, it is almost impossible for any man to say 

 exactly what are the proportions of various races, even 

 in his own person. Each of us is descended from 

 two parents, four grand-parents, eight great-grand- 

 parents, and so forth; so that, unless we could hunt 

 up our pedigrees in every direction for ten genera- 

 tions, involving a knowlege of no less than 1,024 

 ^ifferent persons at the tenth stage backward, we 

 could not even say how far we ourselves were 

 descended from Irish, Scotch, Welsh, or English 

 ancestors respectively. As a matter of fact, every one 

 of us is now, probably, a very mixed product indeed 

 of Teutonic, Celtic, and still earlier elements, which 

 we cannot practically unravel; and, perhaps, all we 

 can really do is to point out that here one kind of 

 blood is predominant, there another, and yonder again 

 a third. 



"The men of the very earliest race that ever lived in 

 England are probably not in any sense our ancestors. 

 They were those black-fellows of the paleolithic or 

 older stone age, whose flint implements and other 

 remains we find buried in the loose earth of the river- 

 drift or under the concreted floors of caves, and who 

 dwelt in Britain while it was yet a part of the main- 

 land, with a cold climate like that of modern Siberia. 

 These people seem to have lived before and between 



