THE MIGRATIONS OF MAN. 23 
But these round-headed people from the East were only 
the first hint of a very serious danger. Round-headed people 
from Asia continued to invade Europe almost incessantly from 
that date until 1600 a.p., or even later. Where did they come 
from? 
Somewhere in Central Asia, sheep and goats, cattle and 
horses were already grazing upon the waving grasses and beautiful 
rolling downs of the boundless Steppes. The day of the wandering 
herdsmen had begun. At first the world seemed inexhaustible. 
There is a fine magnificence in Abraham’s offer to Lot: “If 
thou wilt go to the left hand, then I will go to the right.” 
Indeed, so long as the country was unoccupied they simply 
wandered straight on, eating the grass down to the roots at each 
halting place. 
But, of course, this could not continue indefinitely; to the 
north the bleak and inhospitable forests of Russia and Siberia, 
full of savage beasts and ferocious hunters, were impossible when 
considered as grazing grounds. 
Thus they had eventually to turn either East, South, or 
West. The perpetual production of news flocks and herds, and 
the increase in military strength and in skill of the herdsmen, 
necessarily involved an overflow from the original home. The 
eastward moving herds passed, as we have seen, by the route of 
the Siberian Railway. Those which broke out southwards had 
great difficulties. They had to find their way through mountain 
defiles, across arid deserts, but they succeeded; for these wan- 
dering herdsmen descended in later times upon Asia Minor, 
which was then a civilised and settled country, with rich towns 
and fruitful cultivation. Countless millions of nibbling sheep, 
of omnivorous goats, and of hungry cattle entered and wandered 
throughout the land. They, with their fierce and warlike owners, 
destroyed every green thing; they first isolated and finally 
ruined every luxurious city, and after centuries of destruction 
produced the Asia Minor of to-day.* 
Those that turned West, the Celtic Aryans, entered Europe 
by the Crimea. On that same fertile black soil, which now 
produces the wheat of Odessa, they advanced in successive 
hordes towards the mouths of the Danube. Avoiding the moun- 
*Compare Ramsay Geo, Journ., September, 1902. 
