154 SECRETS OF EARTH AND SEA 



superior and exclusive race, it has not been the only 

 characteristic exalted to such importance. Such "pride 

 of race" has frequently excluded the members of a 

 closely allied but conquered racial group from inter- 

 marriage with the conquerors, and has only disappeared 

 after centuries of persistence. The term " blue blood " is 

 interesting in this connection. It is the " saing d'azure " 

 of the Gothic invaders, the conquerors of the Iberian and 

 Moorish people of Spain. It refers not to any " blueness " 

 of the blood itself, such as distinguishes veinous from 

 arterial blood, but to the blue colour of the veins as 

 seen through the colourless skin of a northern race (the 

 "Goths), as compared with the invisibility of the veins 

 when the skin is rendered more or less opaque by a 

 brown pigment, as in the Moors and the swarthy Iberians. 

 Among the people of Western Europe marriage has 

 assumed more and more a character which is almost 

 unknown in the rest of the world. Whatever the future 

 may be in regard to this matter, there is no doubt 

 possible that the place given to women in Western 

 Europe by the ideals of chivalry and the practice of 

 the northern race (which has so largely displaced the 

 traditions of the Roman Empire) has established a relation 

 of the sexes in which marriage and consequent parentage 

 have ceased to be regarded as a mere regularization of 

 animal desire and appetite. The accepted, but not always 

 consciously recognized, view of marriage in Western 

 Europe is that the union so sanctioned and the families 

 thereby produced should be the result not of the mere 

 physical necessity of irresponsible victims of an impulse 

 common to all animals, but the outcome of the deliberate 

 choice of man and woman attracted to one another by 

 sympathy, understanding and reciprocal admiration, based 

 upon knowledge of character, mental gifts and aspirations, 

 as well as upon bodily charm. A rarely-expressed but 



