410 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



THE GETiE OR GOTHIC NATIONS. 



At length we attain the concluding family of nations. It is 

 that stem, which, though later in reaching the Western Ocean, 

 and, like the rest of the tribes that peopled Europe, though 

 compelled to forsake High Asia, and quit the east, was des- 

 tined nevertheless to hold dominion in Chinese Tahtary, ages 

 after the other Caucasian nations had been expelled or exter- 

 minated by the Mongoles. They likewise were early invaders 

 of India, and are no doubt of the number of those which the 

 Egyptian kings Remses and Thothmes, and the Assyrian 

 Ninus, vainly endeavored permanently to subjugate, notwith- 

 standing that they had the organized masses of great empires 

 at their command, and the invaded mountaineers could not 

 retreat towards the east. This stem of nations was, as it still 

 is, the tall, fair, light, or red-haired portion of the Caucasian 

 type, including the giant races of historical tradition. It ven- 

 tured, in the remotest ages, in small clans, or by mere families, 

 to penetrate far among the dark-haired nations, unsupported by 

 numbers, and trusting solely to their fortitude and valor. The 

 Mongolic, the Ural Altaic Finns, and the Indo Arab nations, 

 have at all times acted by the weight of overwhelming num- 

 bers, therein differing from the fair-haired tribes of mixed and 

 of pure Caucasians, whose cool energy and self-reliance not 

 only takes little account of numbers, but actually is the cause 

 of small sovereignties, and even permanent republics, remain- 

 ing independent to this day. We have in more than one place 

 pointed out families, and clans of this great stem, assuming the 

 absolute mastery of swarthy and of dark-haired nations, or 

 becoming in a collective form the nobility, the privileged class, 

 wherever they resided. An element of this kind, either in 

 part Finnic, or purely Getic, blended in the earliest population 

 of Greece, probably before the formation of the kingdom of 

 Argos, eighteen centuries before the Christian era. The Her* 



