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Rh There must, then, enter into the account some favorable circumstances derived from the mixture of foreign blood which it carries in its veins. This foreign blood is chiefly Semitic. As is well known, the Phœnicians, a people having more than one point of analogy with the maritime powers of our own days, were the first colonizers known in history. The Phœnicians were Semites; and archæological traces of their establishments are still to be found in Malta. They founded Carthage, and covered the Spanish coast with colonies, which probably extended for a considerable distance into the interior of the country. As the latest archæological researches prove, they colonized a good part of Greece. Their influence was so great, and their extension was so wide, that it would have been very strange if they had not contracted in Spain and elsewhere numerous family connections, and thus made their blood participate in the development of the races which have survived them in those countries. In less ancient times, most of the Iberian Peninsula was for hundreds of years in the power of the Arabs, or rather of Moors from Africa. These conquerors, who founded large cities and peopled entire districts, so that the Valencian garden and the valley of Granada still retain their Moorish aspect, who, in short, spread themselves over the whole country, undoubtedly left a numerous posterity behind them. And as the Spanish language is full of Moorish reminiscences, and Arabic words still adorn its vocabulary, how can the nation count the descendants of those Moors who hide their Semitic origin under Spanish names?

The race which now peoples those countries is, therefore, a mixed one; and there is no nation, even to us Germans, that has not furnished its quota to it. The Visigoths passed through Spain. They were dissolved there, and so completely absorbed that not a vestige of them is left, except, perhaps, in the institutions in which the most eminent Spaniards acknowledge, not without a feeling of gratitude, the contribution of Germanic genius to the development of their nation. Thus, from this fusion of Iberians, Phœnicians, Moors, Romans, Celts, and Visigoths, to which may be added, perhaps, a few other German elements, such as the Alani, has risen the modern Spanish people, a mixed people, in the elements of which the pure Aryan race enters in part, but is nowise preponderant. If, now, we should undertake to say, “Wherever a Spaniard can go I can go too, for the same blood flows in the veins of both of us,” we should be in great error. No; Spanish blood is not the same as flows in our veins; no more than is the blood of the Hindoos of to-day, with whom we have but lately tried to make a common ancestry, but whom no one now regards as a primitive race. We now trace our affiliation to that people which, coming down from the north, was crossed, higher classes and all, with the people that occupied the peninsula long before the arrival of the conquerors, and who were black.

There are, then, mixed races, to a certain extent more mixed than