The greater part of the South, like New England, was wholly English in blood and the small element of foreign extraction was not sufficient to exert any appreciable influence upon architectural types. The South had no numerous Welsh, Swedish or German contingent, such as there was in Pennsylvania, and no Dutch majority, as in New York, either to create an exotic bias and modify the expression of its architectural heritage or to seek independent utterance in the same territory. It was English to the core and so was the architecture. Only, as in the matter of speech, we find that traditions somewhat different from those manifested in New England were chosen for preservation. This was partly due, no doubt, as has already been pointed out, to the preponderance of the Saxon strain in the South while New England settlers could trace some of their hereditary preferences to the fact that so many of them came from the Danish parts of old England. The traditions transplanted to American soil by the Southern settlers flourished not only during the period antecedent to the advent of the Georgian mode but persisted concurrently with it and their influence is plainly to be detected in houses erected within the memory of people still living. They are so distinctly individual and so different from the forms to be seen in the Northern or the Middle States that they may be readily recognised at a superficial glance from the windows of a speeding railway carriage. Judging from the light thrown on the subject by recent research and restorations, it is not at all improbable that the colonists of the South and the colonists of New England adhered, at first, to not a few architectural practices identically the same. As an instance we may refer to the chimney built to its full height outside the house wall. This feature endured in the South, while in New England it was practically discontinued at an early period. The reason is not far to seek. The rigours of New England winters demanded the conservation of all available heat and it was simply common sense to enclose the chimney within the house walls, and let none of the warmth, emanating from the heated stones or bricks of the chimney breast and flue, escape into the outer air and be wasted. The more moderate climate of the South did not require such careful conservation and so the outside chimney retained its old form. So it doubtless was, also, with other features so that the divergence in local forms, apart from the matter of hereditary choice of materials and the modes of craftsmanship thereby involved, already alluded to, soon became pronounced and created a crystallised type. What were the distinguishing characteristics of this type, we shall shortly learn. It will, however, be helpful to our general understanding first to get a glimpse of the social life of the period when the Southern Colonial house was in process of evolution.