* * * *
Malta, Crete, and several of the Greek Islands, are European in respect to their politics only. Ethnologically, they are African and Asiatic. In Malta the language of the common people is Arabic, and the blood is probably Arabic also—the superadded elements being numerous.
The aboriginal population of Crete is problematical. If we admit the reasonable presumption that it was an extension of that of the Continent, Egypt and Phœnicia have each a claim; as has Greece. That Minos represents a different person—historical or mythological—from Menes is a current doctrine; but then the notion that any amount of similarity of name may occur within improbably narrow limits both of space and time is current also.
Hence, Egyptian, Phœnician, Anatolian, and perhaps other earlier elements are to be attributed to Crete anterior to the period of its Hellenization. Of the subsequent elements the Arabic is the most important. In each and all, too, of the other isles, the basis is non-Hellenic.
I have no opinion as to the original blood of Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic isles. The last are Spanish in speech, the other two Italian, Arabic elements having been superadded—those introduced by the Roman conquest, and by the Phœnician having preceded them.
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If the ethnological analyses of the preceding pages be true, the extent to which the phenomena of what is called race are liable to over-valuation is considerable; so rare and exceptional is any approach to pure blood, and so little do pedigree and nationality coincide. The most powerful nations are the most heterogeneous. Yet the inference that mixture favours social development would be as unsafe as the exaggeration of the effects of purity. The conditions which are least favourable for a prominent place in the world’s history are the best for the preservation of old characters. The purest populations of Europe are the Basques, the Lapps, the Poles, and the Frisians; yet who can predicate any important character common to them all?
To attribute national aptitudes and inaptitudes or national predilections and antipathies to the unknown influences of blood, as long as the patent facts of history and external circumstances remain unexhausted, is to cut the Gordian Knot rather than to untie it. That there is something in pedigree is probable; but, in the mind of the analytical ethnologist, this something is much nearer to nothing than to everything.
THE END.
LONDON:
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