THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 63 



Germany. In the sandy, infertile Baltic plain the land is held in 

 severalty, inheritance taking place in the direct line. The oldest 

 son, sometimes the youngest, remains on the patrimony, while all 

 the other children go forth into the world to make their way alone. 

 Primogeniture prevails, in short. In the fertile parts of Wiirtem- 

 berg, on the other hand, where the village community long per- 

 sisted, all the children share alike on the death of the father. Each 

 one is a constituent element in the agrarian social body, for which 

 reason no emigration of the younger generation takes place. The 

 underlying reason for this difference may have been that in the 

 north the soil was already saturated with population, so to speak. 

 The farms were too poor to support more than a single family, a 

 condition absent in the south. The net result of such varying cus- 

 toms after a few generations would be to induce a constant Teutonic 

 emigration. Military expeditions may have been merely its super- 

 ficial manifestation. It would, of course, be unwarranted to suggest 

 that any one of these factors alone could cause the great historic 

 expansion. Nevertheless, it is far from improbable that they were 

 contributory in some degree. 



When all the Teutonic tribes broke over bounds and went cam- 

 paigning and colonizing in Gaul and the Roman Empire, a second 

 great racial wave swept over Germany from the east. Perhaps the 

 Huns and other Asiatic savages may have started it; at all events, 

 the Slavic hordes all over the northeast began to move. Here we 

 have another case of a widespread social phenomenon, military on 

 the surface, but involving too many people to be limited to such 

 forcible occupation. There is abundant evidence that these Slavs 

 did not always drive out the earlier population. They often merely 

 filled up the waste lands, more or less peaceably, thus infiltrating 

 through the whole country without necessarily involving blood- 

 shed. 



There are several ways in which we may trace the extent of this 

 Slavic invasion before we seek to apply our criteria of physical char- 

 acteristics. Historically, we know that the Slavs were finally 

 checked by Karl the Great, in the ninth century, at the so-called 

 Limes Sorabicus. This fortified frontier is shown on our map on 

 page 66, bounding the area ruled in large squares diagonally. The 

 Slavic settlements may also be traced by means of place names. 

 Those ending in itz are very common in Saxony; zig also, as in Leip- 

 zig; a in Jena; dam in Potsdam — all these cities were named by 

 Slavs. Indications of this kind abound, showing that the immi- 

 grant hordes penetrated almost to the Rhine. 



It seems impossible that the movements of a people should be 

 traced merely by the study of the way in which they laid out their vil- 



