Note 13 — Chapter II · [8] THE BOER

The permanent and fixed type of the Jewish variety of the human race, which enables it to transmit its physical and mental characteristics with perfect truth even when crossed with another race, was probably created by the fact that the Jews were all descended from one or a very small body of ancestors, and bred rigorously in and in. Their own very suggestive legend states that the original founder mated with his own sister, which would make it almost impossible for the true Jews to revert to any but one type. So it is possible to understand how the Boer, in the course of a few generations, has formed a type fixed and marked, both mentally and physically, only when we consider how small was the number of individuals from which he originally sprung, and how he must of necessity have bred in and in, cousin marrying cousin again and yet again. There probably often land in a large American and Australian port, on a single day, more European emigrants than the number which composed the whole original stock of the Boer, including all French additions; there is therefore no possibility of the average colonist forming so quickly an equally marked type. Even to-day it is not uncommon to find a Boer three times related to his own wife; she may be his first cousin on his father's side, his second cousin on his mother's side, a fourth cousin through a maternal grandmother, and there may have been antecedent intermarriages of which there is no record. The children of such a marriage inheriting an almost homogeneous blood from both sides, can hardly fail to be some fixed type. On the other hand, the Boer race has probably been preserved from the dangers of interbreeding by the fact that the small original stock were of such very distinct national types.