All that can have had a beginning since the beginning of the species itself is the manifestation of the several capacities by outward and appreciable signs. The capacity itself must have existed from the first; and the writer who considers that too great weight is attached to external accidents, and too little to innate qualities, unless he admit either the doctrine of a multiplicity of protoplasts, or extra-natural changes in the faculties of the progenitors of certain favoured nations, when he talks about _race_, only throws back the evolution of the distinctive characters of the populations he may be considering to some period more or less early. If the remote ancestors of the Greeks and the remote ancestors of the Turks be referable to some common parentage, it is mere verbiage to refer the differences between them to _race_, as an ultimate and primary cause. It is no cause, but, itself, an effect--an effect of influences immeasurably early in their actions, but still an effect. For it is evident that of _race_, as it is called, there can be but three causes--original difference of parentage, preternatural changes in the faculties or organization of certain members of one common family, or the operation of the ordinary agencies of climate, nutrition, and ideas. I neither deny nor assert that any one of these three causes is the true one. I only draw attention to a remarkably common inconsistency. A very little amount of ethnological literature will satisfy any one who makes the search that the number of writers who write about _race_, and who are, nevertheless, wholly unprepared for either of the first two explanations of its origin, is very great. So that they admit the third, and the third only. If so, why make so much of the distinction? In the special question before us we are in great danger of overvaluing this undefined element; imagining that intellectual pre-eminence of the highest kind was the original endowment of a section of mankind called Hellenes. That these Hellenes were so favoured is certain, but that they were a _race_ at all is doubtful. Unless the necessity of connecting the Latin and Greek languages in geography as well as in philology have been overvalued, and, along with it, the difficulty of doing so by any simple extension of the two areas, the natural inference from the necessary consequences of a maritime migration follows as a matter of course, viz., the probability of the blood on the mother’s side having been different from that of the father--the one Italian, the other native to the soil. If so, there is an Hellenic language, an Hellenic literature, an Hellenic influence in the world’s history. But there is no Hellenic stock. The tongue belongs to Hellas, and the blood to Italy.