sulated partially by the marshes
or completely by the shallow "Wattenmeer" of this lowland coast, reminds
us of the protracted life of the archaic Lithuanian speech within a
circle of sea and swamp in Baltic Russia, and the survival of the Celtic
tongue in peninsular Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, in Ireland, and the
Highlands and islands of Scotland.

[Sidenote: Unification of race in islands.]

Islanders are always coast dwellers with a limited hinterland. Hence
their stock may be differentiated from the mainland race in part for the
same reason that all coastal folk in regions of maritime development are
differentiated from the people of the back country, namely, because
contact with the sea allows an intermittent influx of various foreign
strains, which are gradually assimilated. This occasional ethnic
intercrossing can be proved in greater or less degree of all island
people. Here is accessibility operating against the underlying isolation
of an island habitat. The English to-day represent a mixture of Celts
with various distinct Teutonic elements, which had already diverged from
one another in their separate habitats--Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Danes,
Norse and Norman French. The subsequent detachment of these immigrant
stocks by the English Channel and North Sea from their home people, and
their arrival in necessarily small bands enabled them to be readily
assimilated, a process which was stimulated further by the rapid
increase of population, the intimate interactive life and unification of
culture which characterizes all restricted areas. Hence islands, like
peninsulas, despite ethnic admixtures, tend to show a surprising
unification of race; they hold their people aloof from others and hold
them in a close embrace, shut them off and shut them in, tend to force
the amalgamation of race, culture and speech. Moreover, their relatively
small area precludes effective segregation within their own borders,
except where a mountainous or jungle district affords a temporary refuge
for a displaced and antagonized tribe. Hence there arises a
preponderance of the geographic over the ethnic and linguistic factors
in the historical equation.

The uniformity in cranial type prevailing all over the British Isles is
amazing; it is greater than in either Spain or Scandinavia. The cephalic
indices range chiefly between 77 and 79, a restricted variation as
compared with the ten points which represents the usual range for
Central Europe