Book excerpt: Excerpt from A Short History of Belgium The national culture Of Belgium is a synthesis, if I may so call it, where one finds the genius of two races - the Romance and the Germanic - mingled, yet modified by the imprint of the distinctively Belgian. It is in that very receptivity - the fact that it has absorbed and unified the best elements of Latin and Teutonic civilization - that the originality of the Belgian national culture resides. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.