accurately measured in a number of different ways, is a subtle index of such differences. Now a thorough investigation of all the available evidence derived from Romano-British skeletons ahs led to the conclusion that between a Roman from Italy and a Briton from Britain there was no regular physical differentiation whatever. The chief authority on the subject declares himself unable to discriminate Roman from British skeletons by any test. That is not so very surprising to a person who knows much of the Roman Empire. It is only surprising if one thinks of the Romans as a conquering race that overran and subdued all the known world and at the same time kept its own Italian blood scrupulously pure. But the Romans whose names we know as the great men of the Empire were many of them not Italians at all. Virgil, from the plain of Lombardy, must have been a Gaul; Seneca was a Spaniard; of the greatest Emperors, Trajan was a Spaniard and Severus (like St. Augustine) an African. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. The 'Romans' were not a pure race but a very mixed one, and one of the chief elements in the mixture was just that Celtic strain which predominated in Britain.
So much for race. As to language, the difference between Latin and ancient Celtic is obvious enough, though they both belong to the same group of the Indo-European family and have very strong family likeness. But the ancient world was always a polyglot world. Our great national languages, English, French, German and so on are quite modern creations; so recently as the Middle Ages they did not exist. Instead of French there was only a cluster of French dialects, and so on; and a dialect-speaker from northern France who wished to be understood by one from southern Frane would talk Latin. In England, the mediaeval gentlemen spoke dialect-English to his tenants, Norman-French to his equals, and Latin to the abbot who came to dinner. Even nowadays, in the near East, every one knows two or three languages, and a really accomplished (though not, in our sense, educated) man will
