n, except in two or three western
counties of Maine which have evidently been mere passways for a tide of
_habitants_ moving on to more attractive conditions of life in the
counties just to the south.[367] But even these large figures do not
adequately represent the British-American element within our boundaries,
because they leave out of account the native-born of Canadian parents
who have been crossing our borders for over a generation.

[Sidenote: Ethnic border zones in the Alps.]

If we turn to northern Italy, where a mountain barrier might have been
expected to segregate the long-headed Mediterranean stock from the
broad-headed Alpine stock, we find as a matter of fact that the ethnic
type throughout the Po basin is markedly brachycephalic and becomes more
pronounced along the northern boundary in the Alps, till it culminates
in Piedmont along the frontier of France, where it becomes identical
with the broad-headed Savoyards.[368] More than this, Provencal French is
spoken in the Dora Baltea Valley of Piedmont; and along the upper Dora
Riparia and in the neighboring valleys of the Chisone and Pellice are
the villages of the refugee Waldenses, who speak an idiom allied to the
Provencal. More than this, the whole Piedmontese Italian is
characterized by its approach to the French, and the idiom of Turin
sounds very much like Provencal.[369] To the north there is a similar
exchange between Italy and Switzerland with the adjacent Austrian
province of the Tyrol. In the rugged highlands of the Swiss Grisons
bordering upon Italy, we find a pure Alpine stock, known to the ancients
as the Rhaetians, speaking a degenerate Latin tongue called Romansch,
which still persists also under the names of Ladino and Frioulian in the
Alpine regions of the Tyrol and Italy. In fact, the map of linguistic
boundaries in the Grisons shows the dovetailing of German, Italian, and
Romansch in a broad zone.[370] The traveller in the southern Tyrol
becomes accustomed in the natives to the combination of Italian
coloring, German speech, and Alpine head form; whereas, if on reaching
Italy he visits the hills back of Vicenza, he finds the German
settlements of Tredici and Sette Communi, where German customs,
folklore, language, and German types of faces still persist, survivals
from the days of German infiltration across the Brenner Pass.[371]

[Illustration: SLAV-GERMAN BOUNDARY IN EUROPE.]

[Sidenote: The Slav-German boundary.]

Where Slavs a