Link Relations of Southwestern Asia 263 



tinent the tenacious boundaries 

 of the yellow race. These 

 have remained substantialh^ 

 unaltered from the earliest 

 gleams of race relations. A 

 similar tenacious boundary ex- 

 ists in the African continent, 

 following closely, though not 

 absolutely, since this itself in- 

 dicates a physiographic condi- 

 tion, the southern line of the 

 date palm and the northern 

 line of the banana. But when 

 we adopt a closer scrutiny of 

 races, as in the map, page 264, 

 in which the chief effort has 

 been to indicate the interrela- 

 tion of the races, whose wider 

 arrangement has been already 

 portrayed, we discover that the 

 bridge of which we have spoken 

 constitutes the one region in 

 which there has been a con- 

 fused admixture of the various 

 types which exist north and 

 south of the Mediterranean and 

 and south of the Himalayan 

 north and south, in short 



The Races of Mankind Before the European 

 Invasion 



north 

 uplift, 

 of the great 

 depression which divides Europe from 

 Africa and the great elevation which di- 

 vides northern from southern Eurasia. 

 On southwestern Asia have flowed from 

 the north the tides of the nomad life in 

 the great plains, which extend without 

 a break from northeastern Siberia to the 

 Caucasus and the Ural. Against it 

 have flowed from the south the Berber 

 and Arab tribes, Hamitic and Semitic, 

 and in some places, as in the inclosed 

 basins of Asia Minor and the basin, 

 ■once as closed, though now opened, of 

 the Hungarian plains, congeners of the 

 yellow races have forced their way. In a 

 long, detached, straggling line the white 

 races hold a slender pathway from their 

 great mass in Europe to their great mass 

 in India. Each of these divisions guided 

 men • by the culture developed in their 

 native region, feeling their way along 

 the parts of that diversifled region be- 



tween the plains about the Sea of Aral 

 and the plains about the Red Sea, to- 

 gether with the Aryan entrance from 

 east or west, to whatever parts of this 

 tract best suit the culture which each 

 has developed in its own home. 



FAUNAL DIVISIONS 



What is true of this linked relation is 

 true also of the fauna. This elevated 

 tract between the plains of Arabia to 

 the south and the plains of Tartary to 

 the north, with its coterminous condi- 

 tions of rainfall, climate, and flora, car- 

 ries analogous animal conditions across 

 the Eurasian mass from east to west. 

 The roe deer among the Cervidse, repre- 

 senting in size, in agility, and in a more 

 graceful outline the gradual change from 

 the bulkier forms of the northern species 

 of the deer to the more slender outlines 

 of the antelope, is found upon the Pa- 

 cific coast in north China and in another 

 extended habitat over Europe. These 



