590 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
In this year 330,000 South Italians take the place of the 250,000 
Germans who came in 1882, when the Teutonic immigration was at 
its flood. One and one-half million Italians have come since 1900, 
over 1,000,000 Russians, and 1,500,000 natives of Austria-Hungary. 
We have even tapped the political sinks of Europe, and are now 
drawing large numbers of Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians. No 
people is too mean or lowly to seek an asylum on our shores. 
The net result of this immigration has been to produce a congeries 
of human beings, unparalleled for ethnic diversity anywhere else on 
the face of the earth. The most complex populations of Europe, such 
as those of the British Isles, northern France, or even of the Balkan 
States, seem ethnically pure by contrast. In some of these places the 
soothing hand of time has softened the racial contrasts. Of course, 
there are certain water holes, like Gibraltar, Singapore, or Hong- 
kong, to which every type of human animal is attracted; and a 
notably mongrel population is the result. But for ethnic diversity 
on a large scale the United States is certainly unique. Our people 
have been diverse in origin from the start to a greater degree than is 
ordinarily supposed. Virginia and New England, to be sure, were 
for a long time Anglo-Saxon undefiled; but in the other colonies 
there was much intermixture, such as the German in Pennsylvania, 
the Swedish along the Delaware, the Dutch in New York, and the 
Highland Scotch and Huguenot in the Carolinas. Little centers of 
foreign inoculation in the early days are discoverable everywhere. 
On a vacation trip recently in the extreme northeastern corner of 
Pennsylvania my wife and a friend remarked the frequency of 
French names of persons, and then of villages, of French physical 
types, and of a French cookery. On inquiry it turned out that many 
settlements had been made by French, who emigrated after the battle 
of Waterloo. Many such colonies could be named, were there time, 
such as the Dutch along the lake shore of western Michigan, the Ger- 
mans in Texas, and the Swiss villages in Wisconsin, none of them 
recent but constituting long-established and permanent elements in 
the population. Concerning New York City, Father Jognes states 
that the director-general told him of eighteen languages spoken there 
in 1644. For the entire thirteen colonies at the time of the revolu- 
tion, we have it on good authority that one-fifth of the population 
could not speak English, and that one-half at least was not Anglo- 
Saxon by descent. Upon such a stock it is little wonder that the 
grafting of these 25,000,000 immigrants should produce an extraor- 
dinary human product. For over half a century more than one- 
seventh of our aggregate population has been of actually foreign 
birth. This proportion of actual foreigners of all sorts varies greatly 
as between the different States. In Minnesota and New York, for 
example, at the present time, the foreign born, as we denote them 
