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If it be objected that the number of these women was too small to have permanently influenced the attitude of the Boer race in its relation towards Africa and the home countries, it must be answered, that small as their number was, they were numerous in proportion to the whole stock from which the race rose. For it must always be borne in mind in studying the South African Boer, how very small that stock was. He was produced—as are all suddenly developed, marked and permanent varieties in the human or animal world—by the close interbreeding of a very small number of progenitors.[13] The handful of soldiers and sailors who first landed, a few agriculturists and their families, the band of orphaned girls, and a small body of French exiles, to be referred to later on, constitute the whole parent stock of the Boer people. From this small stock, by a process of breeding in and in, they have developed, there having been practically no addition made to the breed for the last two hundred years; the comparatively large numbers to which they have attained have entirely to be accounted for by the fact of their personal vigour, very early marriages, and prolific rate of increase. Thus the Boer represents rather a clan or family than a nation; and there is probably no true Boer from the Zambesi to the Cape who does not hold a common strain of blood with almost every other Boer he meets. Each Boer has in him, probably, at least a drop of the blood of these women; and their emotional and intellectual peculiarities can hardly have failed to leave their mark, if slight, upon the racial development.