early German settlers in Cracow, Galicia, were Polonized
mainly under the influence of the Polish nobility, is all the more
interesting when it is contrasted with the German colonists in the
Siebenbuergen, which have remained strongholds of the German language and
culture in the midst of a population of Roumanian peasants for nearly
eight hundred years. Still more interesting are the recent attempts of
the Prussians to Germanize the former province of Posen, now reunited to
Poland. Prussia's policy of colonization of German peasants in Posen
failed for several reasons, but it failed finally because the German
peasant, finding himself isolated in the midst of a Polish community,
either gave up the land the government had acquired for him and returned
to his native German province, or identified himself with the Polish
community and was thus lost to the cause of German nationalism. The
whole interesting history of that episode is related in Bernard's _Die
Polenfrage_, which is at the same time an account of the organization of
an autonomous Polish community within the limits of a German state.

The competition and survival of languages affords interesting material
for the study of cultural contacts and the conditions that determine
assimilation. Investigations of the racial origins of European peoples
have discovered a great number of curious cultural anomalies. There are
peoples like the Spreewaelder who inhabit a little cultural island of
about 240 miles square in the Province of Brandenburg, Prussia.
Surviving remnants of a Slavic people, they still preserve their
language and their tribal costumes, and, although but thirty thousand in
number and surrounded by Germans, maintain a lively literary movement
all their own. On the other hand, the most vigorous and powerful of the
Germanic nationalities, the Prussian, bears the name of a conquered
Slavic people whose language, "Old Prussian," not spoken since the
seventeenth century, is preserved only in a few printed books, including
a catechism and German-Prussian vocabulary, which the German
philologists have rescued from oblivion.

2. The Conflict and Fusion of Cultures

The contacts and transmission of cultures have been investigated in
different regions of social life under different titles. The
ethnologists have investigated the process among primitive peoples under
the title acculturation. Among historical peoples, on the other hand,
acculturation has been called