498 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
3. The Berbers of the Atlas Mountain region deserve much more 
consideration than heretofore has been given them. 
The old function of the Mediterranean, that of being the source of 
culture for the whole world, faded further and further into the back- 
ground in the middle ages. The Romans had united the whole terri- 
tory under one government and in this way had caused a great uni- 
formity in manner of life. In the Roman period all ethnic differ- 
ences were more or less completely veneered by Roman culture which 
graded into Hellenic in the east. The so-called migrations have 
changed this comparative uniformity, attained in a long historical 
period, into the variety of races seen at the present day. The entire 
race map of the Mediterranean has been altered. 
In many cases this complexity is only apparent, for frequently we 
find the primitive races hidden under a new language and a new 
religion which they have adopted. We may well recall as an exam- 
ple that the very mixed population of Asia Minor, including the Cel- 
tic Galatians, at one time gradually acquired the Greek language 
and the Christian religion, while to-day the same people more often 
speak Turkish and are Mohammedans. Only four Mediterranean 
peoples have preserved both their speech and racial peculiarities from 
the period before the migrations, and this has been possible only on 
account of the mountainous, inaccessible, and unattractive nature of 
their countries. These are the Basques, the Albanians, the Berbers, 
and the Greeks. 
The first two have diminished in numbers to a small remnant and 
seem doomed to extinction as races at no very distant day. In spite 
of this, however, both have played a prominent part in recent his- 
tory. The Basques were the supnorters of the Carlist uprising in 
Spain, and the Albanians have been a great factor in oriental ques- 
tions. The Basques are the descendants of the ancient Iberians. 
They have kept to the valleys of the western Pyrenees and to the 
neighboring Basque Mountains, named from them, living partly on 
French and partly on Spanish soil between Bilbao and Bayonne, but, 
through emigration, especially in the nineteenth century, to the La 
Plata States, and through absorption, they have been reduced to 
about a half a million in number. The Albanians sprang from the 
ancient Illyrians, who have been able to hold their position only in 
a portion of their original territory—the most inaccessible middle 
stretches of that great folded girdle of the earth’s crust found on the 
west side of the Balkan peninsula and which may appropriately be 
called “a land of perseverance.” Their long struggles, first with the 
Slavic overflow and then with the Turks, under whose oppression 
great numbers emigrated to Greece and Italy during the fifteenth 
century, did not exterminate them. In southern Italy as far as 
Sicily these Albanians number now about 80,000, although they ap- 
