Time brings about its revenges in many strange ways: we see that there is a continuous and an increasing migration from Wales and the Highlands into all the big towns in England, and this large and growing Celtic element will undoubtedly have a great effect on the population in time, making it less Saxon and more Celtic than it has been these thousand years past and upwards. But in all the people, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Dane, or what not, there is that older constituent--infinitely older and perhaps infinitely more persistent; and this too, albeit in a subtler way, may be working in us to recover its long-lost world. That it has gone far in this direction in Spain, where the blue eye is threatened with extinction, and in the greater portion, if not all, of France, there appears to be some evidence to show. Here, where the Neolithic people were more nearly exterminated and the remnant more completely absorbed, the return may be very much slower. But when we find, as we do in Hampshire and many other counties, that this constituent in the blood of the people, after mixture for untold ages with so many other bloods of so many {238} conquering races, has not only been potent to modify the entire population, but is able to reproduce the old type in its pristine purity; and when we almost invariably find that these ancients born again are better men than those in whom other racial characters predominate--more intelligent, versatile, adaptive, temperate, and usually tougher and longer lived, it becomes possible to believe that in the remote future--there are thousands of years for this little black leaven to work--these islands will once more be inhabited by a race of men of the Neolithic type.