168 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



population, whether Mohfimmedan fellahs or Cop- 

 tic Christians, consists essentially of the original 

 ancient Egyptian type, persisting still as the main 

 element, in spite of foreign conquest and gradual 

 intermixture of the immigrants with the natives. 

 It may be interesting, therefore, from this point 

 of view, to consider briefly the various races, his- 

 torical or prehistoric, which are known to have 

 successively occupied the soil of Britain, and to 

 inquire what light modern research has thrown 

 upon the parts which they have each respectively 

 borne in the building-up of the existing composite 

 British people. 



The very earliest inhabitants of what is now 

 England, known as yet to the ken of science, are 

 the extremely antique and savage folk who fash- 

 ioned, the rudely chipped flint hatchets found in 

 the drift or river-gravel and the somewhat shape- 

 lier rough stone arrow-heads exumed from the 

 solid concrete floors of the limestone caverns. 

 But these most venerable of all ancient Britons 

 liave left, it would seem, but little mark upon the 

 existing modern British people. To be sure, in 

 one sense it is not improbable that we of nine- 

 teenth-century England may be largely or even 

 exclusively descended from the crouching, dark- 

 skinned, Australian-like savages who hunted the 

 mammoth beside the banks of some primeval and 

 forgotten Thames, or who fed upon the flesh of 



