[34] It is interesting to note that two of America's most celebrated literary men, Bret Harte and Walt Whitman, are both of mingled Dutch and English descent. The inhabitants of Europe, from the scientific standpoint, form merely one variety, or rather a blend of closely allied varieties, so intermixed that no invariable characteristic divides one from another. Only those who look no deeper than the superficial demarcations of the present, and who are ignorant of the manner in which, in the centuries preceding and following the Christian era, our Aryan forbears peopled Europe, when for twelve hundred years wave after wave of Aryan humanity swept across the land, now from the Danube to Spain, and then from Scandinavia to Italy or Greece; and again at other times back from Italy or Greece over North-East Europe, each disposing, now here and now there, its layer of folk, till the great conglomerate European family was formed--only those who are ignorant of the peopling of our old continent can regard as other than comparatively superficial scorings on a solid surface those national lines which conquest and political institutions, aided in the course of time by language and manners, have drawn across an essentially homogeneous mass. It is no mere coincidence which makes the Italian girl of Lombardy often as fair-haired and fair-skinned as her Swedish sister; the same old Goth may have forefathered both. And the English brunette and her Spanish rival may have an even closer blood link than that which binds them to the folk in their own street; while the so-called Teutonic peoples are so manifestly one physiological folk, though politically and socially severed, that were a German, a Dutchman, and an Englishman to trace back their parentage, they might easily find that a short twelve hundred years ago it centred in the same individuals. On the extreme West of Europe, where the Portuguese may have his trace of African blood, and on the East where the Russian has his strain of the Mongolian, real differences of race do occur; but, taking Europe roughly and as a whole, not only do our existing national divisions not represent fundamental blood divisions, but they run transversely with such variations in blood as do exist. The large blue-eyed Yorkshireman, who mates the small dark-eyed South of England lass, may easily be making a far more decided cross than had he married a large blue-eyed Dutch or Danish cousin from over the water; the South German is notoriously more distinct, in the shape of his skull and other fixed mental and physical characteristics, from the North German than he is from the Swiss and French folk across his own border; and language and political unity as little indicate common racial descent in the past as blood relationship in the present.