It is to be seen from the quotation I have made that Mr. Romilly Allen starts with the idea of evolution. So does Professor Bury. His "Life of St. Patrick" is a sustained effort to prove that the singular chapter in the world's history opened by Saint Patrick's work in Ireland finds its explanation in this, that Saint Patrick was an evolved product, a resultant, a force naturally generated by the Roman Empire, of which Professor Bury is a distinguished historian. His "Life of St. Patrick" is designed to bring the singular and outstanding phenomenon of Ireland in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, into the direct series of cause and effect with which the historian's greater work has dealt. He writes, he tells us, as one of "the children of reason." But the children of reason cannot explain water as the resultant of its known physical components, oxygen and hydrogen, or salt as the resultant of chlorine and sodium. The properties of water and salt, so long as these substances remain water and salt, are not the properties of their component substances or any combination thereof. In like manner the historian or the archæologist will set himself an impossible task if he undertakes to explain every fact of history or archæology as a sort of mechanical resultant of pre-existing forces. What Romilly Allen says about the Celts is true of every people that has developed and maintained a distinctive nationality. The Romans themselves borrowed from Greece and from Etruria--but the resultant was neither Greece nor Etruria nor Greece plus Etruria nor any permutation or combination of Greek and Etruscan factors. The Greeks borrowed from Crete and Phœnicia, but no mere adding together of Cretan and Phœnician elements produced the Attic salt. Herein lies the justification of nationality, of intense, distinctive and highly developed nationality. In it resides the elemental power of transformation. To it belongs the philosopher's stone. If the Greek people had possessed but a feeble individuality as a people, if they had resembled Cretans and Phœnicians and Persians, if they had not felt instinctively that they had something precious in themselves, something that was worth Thermopylae, then it would never have been written in a later age that: Greece and her foundations are Built beneath the tide of war, Throned on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity.