y English
king can prove such descent, though he can prove it only through a long
and complicated web of female successions. But we may be sure that in no
other case can such a pedigree be proved by the kind of proof which
lawyers would require to make out the title to an estate or a peerage.
The actual forefathers of the modern Englishman may chance to have been,
not true-born Angles or Saxons, but Britons, Scots, in later days
Frenchmen, Flemings, men of any other nation who learned to speak
English and took to themselves English names. But supposing that a man
could make out such a pedigree, supposing that he could prove that he
came in the male line of some follower of Hengest or Cerdic, he would be
no nearer to proving original community of blood either in the
particular Teutonic race or in the general Aryan family. If direct
evidence is demanded, we must give up the whole doctrine of families
and races, as far as we take language, manners, institutions, any thing
but physical conformation, as the distinguishing marks of races and
families. That is to say, if we wish never to use any word of whose
accuracy we cannot be perfectly certain, we must leave off speaking of
races and families at all from any but the purely physical side. We must
content ourselves with saying that certain groups of mankind have a
common history, that they have languages, creeds, and institutions in
common, but that we have no evidence whatever to show how they came to
have languages, creeds, and institutions in common. We cannot say for
certain what was the tie which brought the members of the original group
together, any more than we can name the exact time and the exact place
when and where they came together.

We may thus seem to be landed in a howling wilderness of scientific
uncertainty. The result of pushing our inquiries so far may seem to be
to show that we really know nothing at all. But in truth the uncertainty
is no greater than the uncertainty which attends all inquiries in the
historical sciences. Though a historical fact may be recorded in the
most trustworthy documents, though it may have happened in our own
times, though we may have seen it happen with our own eyes, yet we
cannot have the same certainty about it as the mathematician has about
the proposition which he proves to absolute demonstration. We cannot
have even that lower degree of certainty which the geologist has with
regard to the order of succession between thi