ENGLISHMEN AND WELSHMEN.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3222, 27 October 1881, Page 3

ENGLISHMEN AND WELSHMEN.

As one walks along the streets of a quiet little Welsh town during this tourist season, it is somewhat curious to observe the singular difficulty one finds in distinguishing by sight between the visitors and the natives, especially when both belong to corresponding classes, and are dressed in much the. same way. An English observer in almost any Continental country—say in France or Germany—is constantly struck by the large number of faces belonging to types wholly different from those which he is accustomed to see at home. In Germany, the greater part are fairer, flatter, and rounder-headed 5 in France, the greater part are darker, and have the distinctive G-allic modification of the typical semi-Celtic physique. But in Wales, the mass of the people might be everyday Englishmen of the ordinary London type for aught that one can see to the contrary in their features, their build, or their manner. It is almost startling afc times to hear a group of such thorough English-looking people standing in the street and talking to one another in a foreign language. You scan them as you pass from head to foot, and you say to yourself in your heart, ' They must be English.' . To be sure there are a few more very darkhaired and dark-eyed people proportionately than in Borne parts of eastern England, though hardly more than in Dorset, in Lancashire, or even in Suffolk; but, with this slight exception, the average physique differs in no appreciable way from the average physique of that very heterogeneous ethnical compound, the born Londoner. The slight difference is nearly Jone of varying proportions in the elements, not of totally different elements themselves. The man who goes from Normandy to Pau or to Provence feels that he is practically among another race; the man who goes from any part of England to Wales feels that he is still among essentially that same people accidentally speaking a different tongue. This almost absolute identity of physical appearance, extending as it does even to those more measurable anatomical peculiarities which are capable of objective statement, such as the size and relative proportions of the skull, seems to afford a useful hint as to the ethnical composition of most Englishmen at the present day. If it were true that the early English in their conquest of Britain absolutely exterminated the native Britons, then ifc would be hard to understand the wide divergence of the modern English trom the usual Teutonic or Scandinavian type, or their close approximation to the ancient Biutish type. Some people talk as though the ancient Briton were an extinct animal, only to be recovered from a fewvery misleading remarks of Cesar's, or from the bronze utensils and mouldy skulls in Mr Evans's collection and the British Museum. But of course the real fact is that we can find the ancient Briton still in our midst, in his unmixed purity, from Anglesey to Cornwall, and hear him speaking the ancient British language intact in Merioneth or Carnarvonshire. All talk about Britons and AngloSaxons tends to mask the simple truth that we are dealing from the first with Englishmen and Welshmen ; it belongs to the same exploded school of thought as ' the ancients ' and ' the moderns.' Looking at the question as a simple matter of observation, most inhabitants of England at the present day possess many anatomical • traits in common with the undoubted Celts of Wales and Cornwall, which traits are demonstrably wanting to the modern Germans and Scandinavians, and some of which were demonstrably wanting to the early English invaders whose bones we find in barrows of the heathen English age. The inference seems pretty clear that most in : habitants of England now have at least some fraction of Celtic blood in their veins. This Celtic blood is doubtless duo in many cases to comparatively modern intermarriages with the numerous Welsh, Cornish, Scotch, and Irish families which have migrated eastward and southward for three centures past; but it is probably also due in part to the survival of certain Britons, more or less, afc the I date of tho English conquest.—Pall Mall Gazette.