Natural history -- England -- Hampshire; Natural history -- Outdoor books
Even this may be merely the effect of that enmity or suspicion with
which the stranger, or "foreigner," as he is called, is often
regarded in rural districts. The person from another county, or from
a distance, unrelated to anyone in the community, is always a
foreigner, and the foreign taint may descend to the children: may it
not be that in Hampshire anyone with bright colour in eyes, hair, and
skin is also by association regarded as a foreigner?
It remains to speak of the last of the four distinct types, the least
common and most interesting of all--the small, narrow-headed man with
very black hair, black eyes, and brown skin.
We are deeply indebted to the anthropologists who have, so to speak,
torn up the books of history, and are re-telling the story of man on
earth: we admire them for their patient industry, and because they
have gone bravely on with their self-appointed task, one peculiarly
difficult in this land of many {236} mixed races, heedless of the
scoffs of the learned or of those who derive their learning from
books alone, and mock at men whose documents are "bones and skins."
But we sometimes see that they (the anthropologists) have not yet
wholly emancipated themselves from the old written falsehoods when
they tell us, as they frequently do, that the Iberian in this country
survives only in the west and the north. They refer to the small,
swarthy Welshman; to the so-called "black Celt" in Ireland, west of
the Shannon; to the small black Yorkshireman of the Dales, and to the
small black Highlander; and the explanation is that in these
localities remnants of the dark men of the Iberian race who inhabited
Britain in the Neolithic period, were never absorbed by the
conquerors; that, in fact, like the small existing herds of
indigenous white cattle, they have preserved their peculiar physical
character down to the present time by remaining unmixed with the
surrounding blue-eyed people. But this type is not confined to these
isolated spots in the west and north; it is found here, there, and
everywhere, especially in the southern counties of England: you
cannot go about among the peasants of Hampshire, Wiltshire, and
Dorset without meeting examples of it, and here at all events, it
cannot be said that the ancient British people were not absorbed.
They, the remnant that escaped extermination, were absorbed by the
blue-eyed, broad-headed, tall men, the Goidels we suppose, who
occupied the country at the beginning of the Bronze Age; and the
absorbers were in their {237} turn absorbed by another blue-eyed
race; and these by still another or by others. The only explanation
appears to be that this type is persistent beyond all others, and
that a very little black blood, after being mixed and re-mixed with
blonde for centuries, even for hundreds of generations, may, whenever
the right conditions occur, reproduce the vanished type in its
original form.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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