TEE ATLANTIC FOREST REGION 377 



temperature, the falling away of the leaves temporarily drying out the 

 tree by checking the transpiration current and thus preventing the 

 disastrous effects of freezing. Along the warmer Gulf borders certain 

 deciduous types, as the live oaks, have either never acquired the habit 

 or have lost it since glacial times. 



IV 



A glamour of romance brooded over this forest land and cast its 

 spell on the mind of western Europe. From Kaleigh, dreaming of 

 colonies beyond the sea, down to the days of the great exodus of Euro- 

 pean peoples there was a pervading sense of wonder concerning the new 

 country. History has dealt at length with the motives that prompted 

 whole bodies of people to leave a long-familiar and civilized homeland 

 for an unknown and untried wilderness. ISTo matter what the varied 

 motives may have been — whether from religious or political oppression, 

 or for the betterment of home and fortune — each and all were expres- 

 sions of that migratory impulse that from a remote period had been 

 working out the destiny of the race. 



The English stock that colonized the Atlantic slope of North 

 America was made up of two strains of blood that had mingled to some 

 extent in the mother country, but which was destined to a far wider 

 and more complete fusion in the new world. From an ethnological 

 point of view the Welsh, the Irish and the Highland Scot or Gael have 

 come to be regarded as the modern representatives of an ancient Celtic 

 people that once occupied Britain and that were driven into remote 

 corners of the land by the invading Angle and his allies. As applied 

 to this people and its speech and literature the word " Celtic " has 

 come to stand for a certain kind of temperament — imaginative and 

 emotional in its nature, poetic and inclined to mysticism, a man on 

 the edge of things, elated or cast down, and capable of great bursts of 

 energy. The reverse of this picture is called up by the word " Teu- 

 tonic " — the opposite strain of blood that has mingled so largely with 

 the Celtic element in the moulding of an American type. In point 

 of fact the Teutonic is the dominant strain in most of us to-day; the 

 Celtic being more of a local infusion here and there, like the occasional 

 brook flowing into the main stream of a river. The New England 

 Puritans were almost wholly English Teutons and the same was true 

 of the Virginia colonists. The Teutonic Swede and Hollander held 

 for a time the middle region — the Hudson and the lower valley of the 

 Delaware — and left an infusion of their blood in the dominant English 

 population which may still be traced in certain family names. The 

 Quakers that settled Pennsylvania were, like the Puritans, of Teutonic 

 English stock. The Scotch-Irish peoples, likewise largely Teutonic, 

 settled the Carolina seaboard. The main German migration spread 

 through the middle region — in the Delaware and Susquehanna water- 



