Whetham.Sociology and Eugenics.245
their foundation. Cambridge has been the nursing mother of the Anglo-
Danish stock, and has turned out a long line of poets, men of science, and
mystics. There is, indeed, much truth in the old saying that Cambridge
bred the martyrs and Oxford burned them. Oxford has collected men of
the Saxon race, intermingled with survivors of the so-called “ Celtic ” and
pre-Roman tribes of England, who were driven into the West, and, in their
turn, drove the short, dark Mediterranean stock before them into Wales and
Cornwall. The western university has produced the historians and the
philosophers, and has always greatly influenced the literature of England.
At the present day Oxford is far more largely represented in literature and
on the public press of the Empire than Cambridge, while in science, mathe
matics, medicine, and engineering, Cambridge is easily pre-eminent. Once
started on their course, the characteristics of the two Universities have
persisted into days when they draw more evenly from all parts of the
country. The two Universities are but the indices of the mental qualities of the
different populations they have attracted within their doors. It would
appear that there are three principal foci of ability in England; one, in
East Anglia, including Lincolnshire and the adjacent counties, of which
Isaac Newton is the supreme achievement; a second, in the West, centring
round Devon, Somerset, and Wilts, of whom, perhaps, Sir Walter Raleigh,
soldier, administrator, courtier, and man of letters, is typical; a third,
remarkable for its artistic and literary bent, on the English side of the
Welsh borders. It is from these last two areas that in early days Oxford
has largely drawn her scholars. Kent, which, like East Anglia, early
attained a high state of civilization, partly owing to proximity with the
Continent of Europe, also shows a high proportion of realised ability, of
the western rather than of the Anglian character. The large towns,
including even London, with its immense attractions for the able and
ambitious, have no special record in the production of commanding personali
ties, nor have the great centres of population in the north of England yet
added their due quota to the men of distinction among us. The type of
population developed in or attracted by the industrial developments of the
nineteenth century is apparently not of the kind freely to produce philo
sophers, statesmen, poets, or men of science.
As we have said before, it is impossible to reconstruct with any certainty
the stages by which a fortunate balance first was attained and then overset
in the ancient world; but, in modern civilization, there are several tendencies
at work which would affect adversely the northern races, that is, if we may
accept the evidence which indicates that the upper social strata and the
country districts contain a predominant share of northern blood.
Although on the Continent of Europe, in districts where the Northern
and Alpine races meet, the Northern element seems to preponderate in
the towns, yet there seems no doubt that in England, as between the
