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If our supposition be correct and the Huguenot truly helped in the formation of the Taal, then his influence over the Boer, and through him over South Africa, has been, as we have said, almost unlimited. For the Taal has largely helped to make the Boer what he is.

It has been to him what its spinal column is to a vertebrate creature, that on which its minor peculiarities depend, and the key to its structure. It has been the prime conditioning element in his growth, beside which all others become secondary.

Naturalists tell us that on certain isolated mountain peaks, or on solitary islands, surrounded by deep oceans, there are sometimes found certain unique forms of plant and animal life, peculiar to that one spot, and not to be found elsewhere on the earth; and that, further, there is nothing in the climate or the soil to account for the fact that this special little plant, or winged insect, or tortoise, should be found there and nowhere else. The whole fact is a mystery, till science makes a further discovery. It finds all over the surface of the earth, the fossilized remains of just such, or analogous plants or animals, and then the mystery is solved; and it is clear that our unique species have no particular relation to the spot in which they are found, nor have they been evolved through its influence. They are but the survivals of forms of life once universal, which have been preserved in those situations when the rest of their species perished, through the action of some isolating medium—the inaccessible height of the mountain crags or the width of the ocean—which has preserved them from the forces which have modified or destroyed their race elsewhere. Such a unique human species is the true South African Boer. Like the marsupials of Australia, or the mammoth tortoises of the Galapagos Islands, he is incomprehensible while we regard his peculiarities as evolved by the material conditions about him; he becomes fully comprehensible only when we recognize the fact that he is a survival of the past; that the peculiar faiths, habits, superstitions, and virtues now peculiar to him were once the common properties of all European peoples; that he is merely a child of the seventeenth century surviving on though modified by climate and physical surroundings into the nineteenth, and that the true isolating medium through which this remarkable survival has been effected has been mainly the Taal.