378 BRITISH MAMMALS 



mate. Under the Normans, too, and thenceforth down to our 

 own days, Jews and Gipsies entered England, the Jews settling- 

 for the most part at the coast towns, while the Gipsies pro- 

 portionately to their small numbers exerted a remarkable influence 

 over the character of the population in many parts of Essex, 

 Devon, Shropshire, Lancashire, and Southern Scotland. The 

 Gipsies were originally a nomad race of North-western India, be- 

 longing to the Caucasian family, of mixed Dravidian, Iberian, and 

 Aryan stock. They infused into parts of England the influence 

 of the dark eyes, dark hair, and lither forms of the eastern 

 Caucasian. The Jewish type has exerted the most influence over 

 parts of Kent, South Hampshire, South Yorkshire, London and 

 its suburbs, and Lancashire. The connection of Bristol and 

 Glasgow with the West Indian trade has actually introduced a 

 slight (and now scarcely traceable) negro element into the 

 population on the banks of the Clyde and the Somersetshire 

 Avon. Numbers of merchants and adventurers from Scotland 

 and Bristol married in the West Indies half-castes, or quadroons 

 or octoroons, and their children — dark-haired, brown-eyed, and 

 vivacious, and not differing very markedly from the Iberian 

 element — have perpetuated this strain in the districts above 

 mentioned. As Ireland has been kept apart from all consider- 

 able racial immigration since the invasion of the island by the 

 Norman and English nobility (who, however, brought over 

 numbers of Welsh and a few English and Scotch settlers at 

 different times), it is in Ireland that may be seen most marked 

 and least blurred the main elements of the British population 

 prior to the Norman Conquest — the oldest stock of all 

 (Neanderthaloid and Eskimo), the handsome Iberian, the red- 

 haired Kelt — ugly, but strong, resolute, and grim — the fair-haired 

 Norseman, and the very similar but shorter-statured Anglo- 

 Saxon. 



With the exception of the red deer, the common mouse, 

 the brown and the black rats, man is probably the most recently 

 arrived mammal in the British Islands, and his advent and 

 development may fitly close this review. 



