TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. 11 For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither. of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and, money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. We drove along the lonely ridge Shone white above the dreaming park; And over all the shadowy plain Of empty fields and fading trees From the pale gold of dying elms The unknown woods of misty blue. Then, as we journeyed in the dusk, And heard the wild owls hoot and cry From moss-grown barns and haggard trees, Our talk was all of things gone by; Until we almost seemed to see Lord Essex lead his troops again, And hear the thund'ring crash and thud Of Rupert's horsemen on the plain. Speaker. C. FELLOWES. "IF I WERE FAIR." If I had little hands and slender feet; THE FOLK-MOTE BY THE RIVER. And Gregory the Wright was one And what he bade us that we did, So out we went, and the clattering latch It was dark in the porch, but our scythes we felt, And thrust the whetstone under the belt. Then out a-gates and away we strode From The Contemporary Review. a part, and indeed a great part, of history; THE MIGRATIONS OF THE RACES OF MEN they create nations and build up states; CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY.❤ BY JAMES BRYCE. THERE are two senses in which we may claim for geography that it is a meetingpoint of the sciences. All the departments of research which deal with external nature touch one another in and through it-geology, botany, zoology, meteorology, as well as, though less directly, the various branches of physics. There is no one of these whose data are not, to á greater or less extent, also within the province of geography; none whose conclusions have not a material bearing on geographical problems. And geography is also the point of contact between the sciences of nature, taken all together, and the branches of inquiry which deal with man and his institutions. Geography gathers up, so to speak, the results which the geologist, the botanist, the zoologist, and the meteorologist have obtained, and presents them to the student of history, of economics, of politics - we might, perhaps, add of law, of philology, and of architecture -as an important part of the data from which he must start, and of the materials to which he will have to refer at many points in the progress of his researches. It is with this second point of contact, this aspect of geography as the basis for history, that we are to occupy ourselves to-night. Understanding that the Scottish Geographical Society desires to bring into prominence what may be called the human side of the science, and to inculcate its significance for those who devote themselves to the presently urgent problems of civilized society, I have chosen, as not unsuitable to an inaugural address, a subject which belongs almost equally to physical and descriptive geology on the one side, to history and economics on the other. The movements of the races and tribes of mankind over the surface of our planet are in the first instance determined mainly by the physical conditions of its surface and its atmosphere; but they become themselves • An inaugural address delivered at the first meeting of the London branch of the Scottish Geographical Society. they determine the extension of languages and laws; they bring wealth to some regions and leave others neglected; they mark out the routes of commerce and affect the economic relations of different countries. No line of historical inquiry sets before us more clearly at every stage the connection between man as an associative being toiling, trading, warring, ruling, legislating-and that physical environment whose influence over his development is none the less potent and constant because he has learnt in obeying it to rule it and to make it yield to him constantly increas. ing benefits. The topic is so large and branches off into so many other cognate inquiries, that you will not expect me, within the narrow limits of an address, to do more than draw its outlines, enumerate the principal causes whose action it sets before us, touch upon its history, and refer to a few out of the many problems its consideration raises. The migrations of peoples have been among the most potent factors in making the world of to-day different from the world of thirty centuries ago. If they continue they will be scarcely less potent in their influence on the future of the race; if they cease, that cessation will itself be a fact of the highest economic and social significance. At the outset it is convenient to distinguish the different forms which movements of population have taken. These forms may be grouped under three heads, which I propose to call by the names of transference, dispersion, and permeation names which need a few words of illus. tration. By transference I mean that form of migration in which the whole, or a large majority of a race or tribe quits its ancient seats in a body and moves into some other region. Such migrations seldom occur except in the case of nomad peoples who are little attached to any particular piece of soil; but we may almost class among the nomads tribes who, like our own remote Teutonic ancestors, although they cultivate the soil, put no capital into it in the way of permanent improvements, and that which it finds, depends chiefly on the difference between the level of civilization of the two races. Between the English settlers in North America and the build no dwellings of brick or stone. The | migrating population becomes fused with prehistoric migrations usually belonged to this form, and so did that great series of movements which brought the northern races into the Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries of our era. In mod-native Indians there has been hardly any ern times we find few instances, because mixture of blood; between the French in such nomad races as remain are now shut Canada and the Indians there was a little up within narrow limits by the settled more; between the Spaniards and the less states that surround them, which have barbarous inhabitants of Mexico there has possessed, since the invention of gun- been so much that the present Mexican powder and of standing armies, enor- nation is a mixed one, the native blood mously superior defensive strength. We doubtless predominating. Something, should, however, have had an interesting however, also depends on the relative case to point to had the Dutch, when numbers of the two races; and some. pressed by the power of Philip II., em- times religion keeps a dispersed people braced the offer that came to them from from commingling with those among England to migrate in a body and estab- whom it dwells, as has happened in the lish themselves, their dairying, 'their flax case of the Jews, the Armenians, and the culture, and their linen manufacture in stance of an extremely small nation-for the rich pastures and humid air of Ire- Parsees. These last are a remarkable inland. there are not eighty thousand of them all Under the head of migrations by dis- told-who, without any political organpersion, I include those cases in which a ization, have by virtue of their religion tribe or race, while retaining its ancient preserved their identity for more than a seats, overflows into new lands, whether thousand years. Dispersion has been the vacant or already occupied; in the latter most widely operative form of migration event sometimes ejecting the original in-in modern times, owing to those improvehabitants, sometimes fusing with them, sometimes dwelling among them, but remaining distinct. ments in navigation which have enabled remote parts of our large world, separated by broad and stormy seas, to be colonized more easily than in the tiny world of ancient or mediæval times was possible even by land. Examples are furnished by the case of the Norsemen, who found Iceland practically vacant, while in England they became easily, in Ireland and Gaul more The third form, which we may call slowly, mingled with the previous inhabi- permeation or assimilation, is not in tants. When our own ancestors came from strictness a form of migration at all, bethe Frisian coast they slew or drove out cause it may exist where the number of the bulk of the Celtic population; when persons changing their dwelling-place is the Franks entered Gaul they became extremely small; but it deserves to be commingled with it. It is by such a proc- reckoned with the other two forms because ess of dispersion that the British race it produces effects closely resembling has spread itself out over North America theirs in altering the character of a popu and Australasia. In much smaller num-lation. I use the term permeation to cover bers, the Spaniards diffused themselves over southern North America, and the northern and western parts of South America; and by a similar process the Russians have for two centuries been very slowly filling the better parts of Siberia. Whether in each case of dispersion the * In 1771 a great Kalmuk horde moved en masse from the steppes of the Caspian to the frontiers of China, losing more than half its numbers on the way. those instances, both numerous and important, in which one race or nation so spreads over another race or nation its language, its literature, its religion, its institutions, its customs, or some one or more of these sources of influence, as to impart its own character to the nation so influenced, and thus to supersede the original type by its own. In such a process the infusion of new blood from the stronger people to the he Es bes ere is Jeriz gradually Russified during the last two centuries, are on their way to become practically undistinguishable from the true Slavonic Russians of Kieff. And to come nearer home, the Celts of Cornwall have been Anglified, and those of the Highlands of Scotland have in many districts become assimilated to the Lowland Scotch, with no great intermixture of blood. weaker may be comparatively slight, yet | native races, possibly with little social inif sufficient time be allowed, the process timacy between them. The instances just may end by a virtual identification of the mentioned show in what different ways two. Of course, when there is much in- and varying degrees assimilation may take termarriage, not only does the change pro- place. In some of them the assimilated ceed faster, but it tells on the permeating race still retains a distinct national charas well as on the permeated race. The acter. The Moor of Morocco, for inearliest instance of this diffusion of a stance, differs from the Arab much as the civilization with little immixture of blood Greek-speaking Syrian and the Latin is to be found in the action of the Greek speaking Lusitanian differed from a Greek language, ideas, and manners upon the of Attica or a Roman of Latium. But the countries round the eastern half of the Finnish tribes of northern and eastern Mediterranean, and particularly upon Russia, Voguls, Tcheremisses, TchuAsia Minor. The native languages to vasses, and Mordvins, who have been some extent held their ground for a while in the wilder parts of the interior, but the upper classes and the whole type of culture became everywhere Hellenic. In the same way the Romans Romanized Gaul and Spain and North Africa. In the same way the Arabs in the centuries immediately after Mohammed Arabized not only Egypt and Syria, but the whole of North Africa, down to and including the maritime parts of Morocco, and have in later times, though to a far smaller extent, established the influence of their language and religion on the coasts of East Africa and in parts of the East Indian Archipelago. There is reason to believe, though our data are scanty, that in a somewhat similar way the Aryan tribes, who entered India at a very remote time, diffused their language, religion, and customs over northern Hindustan as far as the Bay of Bengal, changing to some extent the dark races whom they found in possession of the country, but being also so commingled with those more numerous races as to lose much of their own character. Hinduism and languages derived from Sanskrit came to prevail from the Indus to the Brahmaputra, although it would seem that to the east of the Jumna the proportion of Aryan intrudvery small. We ourselves in India are giving to the educated and wealthier class so much that is English in the way of ideas and literature that if the process continues for another century, our 5 tongue may have become the lingua franca of India, and our type of civilization have extinguished all others. Yet if this happens it will happen with no mixture of blood between the European and the ers was It is worth while to be exact in distinguishing this process of permeation from cases of dispersion, because the two often go together - that is to say, the migration of a certain, though perhaps a small number of persons of a vigorous and masterful race into a territory inhabited by another race of less force, or perhaps on a lower level of culture, is apt to be followed by a predominance of the stronger type, or at any rate by such a change in the character of the whole population as leads men in later times to assume that the number of migrating persons must have been large. The cases of the Greeks in western Asia and the Spaniards in the New World are in point. We talk of Asia Minor as if it had become a Greek country under Alexander's successors, of Mexico and Peru as Spanish countries after the sixteenth century, yet in both instances the native population must have largely preponderated. If therefore we were to look only at the changes which the speech, the customs, the ideas and institutions of nations have undergone, we might be disposed to attribute too much to the mere movement of races, too little to the influences which force of character, fertility of intellect, and command of scientific resource have exercised, and are still exercising, as the lead |