THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 455 



shifting suddenly now with modern industrial life, but they have 

 persisted until the present through generations. Proof of this 

 antiquity we have ; where Nature has isolated little pools since, 

 of population, we may still find men with an unbroken ancestral 

 lineage reaching back to a time when the climate, the flora and 

 fauna of Europe were far different from those which prevail to- 

 day. This may be shown, not by historical documents, for these 

 men antedate all written history, but by physical traits which are 

 older than institutions and outlast them all as well. 



This varied population, as we see it to-day, is in its racial com- 

 position the effect of a long train of circumstances, historical 

 upon the surface, social it may be in part, but at bottom also geo- 

 graphical. From these effects, and from the migrations even now 

 going on, we may seek out the causes many of which have hith- 

 erto been neglected by students of institutions which have been 

 operative for centuries, and which have gone on in spite of 

 political events or else have indirectly given rise to them. Prog- 

 ress in social life has not been cataclysmic ; it has not taken 

 place by kangaroo-leaps of political or social reforms on paper; 

 but it has gone on slowly, painfully perhaps, and almost imper- 

 ceptibly, by the constant pressure of slight but fixed causes. Our 

 problem is to examine certain of these fundamental mainsprings 

 of movement, especially the influence of the physical environ- 

 ment ; and to do it by means of the calipers, the measuring tape, 

 and the color scale. Science proceeds best from the known pres- 

 ent to the remote past, in anthropology as in geology or astron- 

 omy. The study of living men should precede that of the dead. 

 This shall be our method. Fixing our attention upon the present 

 population, we shall then be prepared to interpret the physical 

 migrations and to some extent the social movements which have 

 been going on for generations in the past. 



Let us at the outset avoid the error of confusing community 

 of language with identity of race. Nationality may often follow 

 linguistic boundaries, but race bears no necessary relation what- 

 ever to them. Two essentials of political unity are bound up in 

 identity of language namely, the necessity of a free interchange 

 of ideas by means of a common mental circulating medium ; and, 

 secondly, the possession of a fund of common traditions in his- 

 tory or literature. The first is largely a practical consideration ; 

 the second forms the subtle essence of nationality itself. For 

 these reasons we shall find language corresponding with political 

 affiliations far more often than with ethnic boundaries.* Politics 



*A full discussion of this point is offered in Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie, 

 Paris, 1862, p. 264. Vide also Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. v, p. 212 ; and 

 Mittheilungen der anthropologischen Gesellschaft, Wien, Supp. I, p. viii. 



