Even the Boer language has deteriorated under the effects of isolation and a lower status of civilization.

The native _Taal_ differs widely from the polished speech of Holland; it preserves some features of the High Dutch of two centuries ago, but has lost inflexions and borrowed words for new phenomena from the English, Kaffirs and Hottentots; can express no abstract ideas, only the concrete ideas of a dull, work-a-day world.[78] The new habitat may eliminate many previously acquired characteristics and hence transform a people, as in the case of the Boers; or it may intensify tribal or national traits, as in the seafaring propensities of the Angles and Saxons when transferred to Britain, and of the seventeenth century English when transplanted to the indented coasts of New England; or it may tolerate mere survival or the slow dissuetude of qualities which escape any particular pressure in the new environment, and which neither benefit nor handicap in the modified struggle for existence.
NOTES TO CHAPTER II.
[34] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap.

V, p.166.New York, 1895.
[35] E.Virchow, _Rassenbildung und Erblichkeit_, Bastian Festschrift, pp.

14, 43, 44.

Berlin, 1896.
[36] Darwin, Descent of Man, pp.