These differences between the inhabitants of neighbouring and of adjoining counties are doubtless in some measure due to local conditions, of soil, climate, {222} food, customs, and so on, acting for long generations on a stay-at-home people: but the main differences are undoubtedly racial; and here we are on a subject in which we poor ordinary folk who want to know are like sheep wandering shepherdless in some wilderness, bleating in vain for guidance in a maze of fleece-tearing brambles. It is true that the ethnologists and anthropologists triumphantly point out that the Jute type of man may be recognised in the Isle of Wight, and in a less degree even in the Meon district; for the rest, with a wave of the hand to indicate the northern half of the county, they say that all that is or ought to be more or less Anglo-Saxon. That's all; since, as they tell us, the affinities of the South Hampshire people, of the New Forest district especially, have not yet been worked out. Not being an anthropologist I can't help them; and am even inclined to think that they have left undone some of the things which they ought to have done. The complaint was made in a former chapter that we had no monograph on fleas to help us; it may be made, too, with regard to the human race in Hampshire. The most that one can do in such a case, since man cannot be excluded from the subjects which concern the naturalist, is to record one's own poor little unscientific observations, and let them go for what they are worth. [Sidenote: Gentry and peasantry]