1865.] Pengellt on the Causes of Britain s Greatness. 35 



the present level, and reduced to an archipelago of small islands 

 This was a period of floating ice. 



The position of a country, however, in the family of nations, is a 

 product of which not only physical conditions, but human skill and 

 industry are important factors ; hence the question of race enters 

 largely into the speculation ; the subject has an ethnological aspect. 



The different races into which the human family resolves itself 

 are either the offspring of so many distinct original types, or the 

 outcome of varied external conditions operating, through long periods 

 of time, on the plastic descendants of one primal pair. On the first 

 hypothesis, each original type must have come into being harmo- 

 niously related to the pre-existing physical characters of the district 

 in which it was placed ; and to this and similar districts its continued 

 existence was necessarily limited. On the second, the race-characters 

 are simply a reflex of the geology and geography of the area in which 

 they were moulded as well as pre-written. 



There can be no doubt that Britain and its Anglo-Saxon inha- 

 bitants are well adapted to each other. The energy and enterprise, 

 characteristic of the latter, are not only necessary to the development 

 of the resources of the former, but are fostered and fixed by the occu- 

 pations pre-determined and necessitated by the physical conditions of 

 the country. A district rich in minerals is valuable to an enter- 

 prising race only. A body of men can scarcely descend daily into 

 the bowels of the earth, braving the dangers inseparable from such an 

 employment, without being confirmed in any love of adventure which 

 they may possess, and influencing the population of which they form 

 a part. The coal miners of England number upwards of two hundred 

 and forty thousand, and the metalliferous miners of Cornwall amount 

 to very nearly thirty-one thousand, or upwards of one-twelfth of the 

 entire population of the county. We can scarcely send this body of 

 men — a total of more than a quarter of a million — underground daily, 

 there to become familiar with danger in various forms, without being 

 prepared to find in them and their offspring a character very unlike 

 that of an agricultural population. Moreover, where, as in Cornwall, 

 each miner is, in some shape, a partner in the undertaking ; where he 

 contracts to cut, at per fathom, rocks — sometimes granite, sometimes 

 slate, sometimes elvan — varying much in hardness and in the posses- 

 sion of divisional planes ; or where he is paid by a percentage on the 

 proceeds ; his prosperity depends on his observation, judgment, skill, 

 and application. He may take as his motto — " Thought and Perse- 

 verance, or Starvation." An education of this kind not only makes him 

 a skilful miner, but prompts him to carry his labour to the best mar- 

 ket, even though he may find it at the antipodes. It is not surprising, 

 therefore, that in whatever part of the world metals are found, there 

 also are found Cornishmen engaged in extracting them. 



Again, all other things being equal, a population will have mari- 

 time tendencies in proportion to the relative coast-line of their 

 country ; hence an unusually large percentage of the British nation 

 are fishermen and sailors — that is to say, men familiarized with hard- 

 ship and danger, and compelled to think ; and this is probably true 



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