n of Kazan or Archangel can converse readily with the citizen
of Riga or St. Petersburg, Germans from highland Bavaria and Swabia are
scarcely intelligible to Prussian and Mecklenberger. And whereas Germany
a few decades ago could count over a hundred different kinds of national
dress or _Tracht_, Great Russia alone, with six times the area, had only
a single type with perhaps a dozen slight variations. Leroy-Beaulieu
comments upon this eternal sameness. "The cities are all alike; so are
the peasants, in looks, habits, in mode of life. In no country do people
resemble one another more; no other country is so free from political
complexity, those oppositions in type and character, which even yet we
encounter in Italy and Spain, in France and Germany. The nation is made
in the likeness of the country; it shows the same unity, we might say
the same monotony, as the plains on which it dwells."

[Sidenote: Influence of soils in low plains.]

The more flat and featureless a lowland is, the more important become
even the slightest surface irregularities which can draw faint dividing
lines among the population. Here a gentle land-swell, river, lake,
forest, or water-soaked moor serves as boundary. Especially apparent is
the differentiating influence of difference of soils. Gravel and
alluvium, sand and clay, chalk and more recent marine sediments,
emphasize small geographical differences throughout the North German
lowland and its extension through Belgium and Holland; here various
soils differentiate the distribution of population. In the Netherlands
we find the Frisian element of the Dutch people inhabiting chiefly the
clay soils and low fens of the west and northwest, the Saxon in the
diluvial tracts of the east, and the Frankish in the river clays and
diluvium of the south. All the types have maintained their differences
of dialect, styles of houses, racial character, dress and custom.[1043]
The only distinctive region in the great western lowland of France,
which comprises over half of the country, is Brittany, individualized in
its people and history by its peninsula form, its remote western
location, and its infertile soil of primary rocks. Within the
sedimentary trough of the Paris Basin, a slight Cretacean platform like
the meadow land of Perche[1044] (200 to 300 meters elevation) introduces
an area of thin population devoted to horse and cattle raising in close
proximity to the teeming urban life of Paris. The eastern