nd Teutons come together in Central Europe, their race
border is a zone lying approximately between 14 and 24 degrees East
Longitude; it is crossed by alternate peninsulas of predominant Germans
and Austrians from the one side, Czechs and Poles from the other, the
whole spattered over by a sprinkling of the two elements. Rarely, and
then only for short stretches, do political and ethnic boundaries
coincide. The northern frontier hem of East Prussia lying between the
River Niemen and the political line of demarcation is quite as much
Lithuanian as German, while German stock dots the whole surface of the
Baltic provinces of Russia as far as St. Petersburg, The eastern rim of
the Kaiser's empire as far south as the Carpathians presents a broad
band of the Polish race, averaging about fifty kilometers (30 miles) in
width, sparsely sprinkled with German settlements; these are found
farther east also as an ethnic archipelago dotting the wide Slav area of
Poland. The enclosed basin of Bohemia, protected on three sides by
mountain walls and readily accessible to the Slav stock at the sources
of the Vistula, enabled the Czechs to penetrate far westward and there
maintain themselves; but in spite of encompassing mountains, the inner
or Bohemian slopes of the Boehmer Wald, Erz, and Sudetes ranges
constitute a broad girdle of almost solid German population.[372] In the
Austrian provinces of Moravia and Silesia, which form the southeastward
continuation of this Slav-German boundary zone, 60 per cent. of the
population are Czechs, 33 per cent. are German, and 7 per cent., found
in the eastern part of Silesia, are Poles.[373]

An ethnic map of the western Muscovite Empire in Europe shows a marked
infiltration into White and Little Russia of West Slavs from Poland,
and in the province of Bessarabia alternate areas of Russians and
Roumanians. The latter in places form an unbroken ethnic expansion
from the home kingdom west of the Pruth, extending in solid bands as
far as the Dniester, and throwing out ethnic islands between this
stream and the Bug.

[Illustration: ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF RUSSIA.
MONGOLOID: Kalmucks, Kirghis, Nogai, Tartars, Bashkirs, Voguls,
Ostiaks, Samoyedes.
ZIRIAN: Mingled Mongoloid and Finnish.]

[Sidenote: Assimilation of culture in boundary zones.]

In the northern provinces of Russia, in the broad zone shared by the
aboriginal Finns and the later-coming Slavs, Wallace found villages in
every stage of Russific