THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 167 



parents, four grandparents, eiglit great-grand- 

 parents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so 

 on ad infinitum; and the chances of any one sin- 

 gle personage being able to make out a i)ure 

 Norman, or Saxon, or Danish pedigree, down to 

 the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth generation, may be 

 practicall}^ regarded as what mathematicians term 

 a vanishing quantity. Whenever a geneah)gy is 

 carefully worked out in the ascending order 

 through all lines alike, it is almost invariably 

 found that a few generations back it ramifies out 

 widely into all parts of the country, and em- 

 braces elements of the most diverse possible 

 ethnological origin and social status. 



But of late years it has also become increas- 

 ingly clear that, in attempting to account for the 

 various race-elements which go to make up the 

 existing composition of any particular nation, we 

 have to take into consideration not only the well 

 known historical factors, but also the less ob- 

 trusive but far more deeply persistent prehistoric 

 peoples who everywhere occupied the soil of each 

 country before the advent of the first historical 

 colonists. Egypt, for example, is a country 

 which from all time has been constantly overrun 

 and conquered by Persians, Greeks, Romans, and 

 Arabs, who have formed from time to time its 

 upper classes and governing body ; yet to this 

 day the preponderating portion of the Egyptian 



