The Runagates Club

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.<br/>Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici.<br/>We were talking about the persistence of race qualities—how you might bury a strain for generations under fresh graftings but the aboriginal sap would some day stir. The obvious instance was the Jew, and Pugh had also something to say about the surprises of a tincture of hill blood in the Behari. Peckwether, the historian, was inclined to doubt. The old stock, he held, could disappear absolutely as if by a chemical change, and the end be as remote from the beginnings as—to use his phrase—a ripe Gorgonzola from a bucket of new milk.