ish
mountains. France has driven her aborigines into the peninsula of
Brittany and the gorges of the Eastern Pyrenees. The Finns find refuge
among the frozen swamps north-east of St. Petersburg. The ethnic museum
of mountainous Spain is more rich and varied than that of her Northern
neighbors, and Italy has remnants dating back into the night of historic
time in Sardinia and the Abruzzi. Japan, ancient as she is, has her
Ainos of unrecorded antiquity, and the ranges of Central India are
haunted by races still more primitive and unprepossessing in manners and
physiognomy. Over the plains of both continents so many successive waves
of population have swept that no race can claim more than a comparative
antiquity. The traceable pedigree of any given community becomes very
short indeed, and the inquirer contents himself with conceding that the
Thibetan sept which arrogates descent from Alexander's Greeks may do so
with truth--say as much truth as there was in the descent of certain
straw-colored Creeks and Choctaws from the followers of De Soto.

Unlike the Thibetans, the Kabyles repudiate classic origin. They are the
only people who have made "barbarian" a title of honor, and call
themselves Berbers, the modern name having been given them by the
Arabs. The dwellers on the Danube, the Seine and the Thames, who once
shared with them the designation of "barbarian," were quick to shake it
off. European Barbary exists no longer. Its modern inhabitants amuse
themselves with exploring the southern shore of the Mediterranean, and
in ascertaining whether their whilom fellow-provincials of that coast
are still determined to be barbarous in fact as in name. The Germans
took their turn at an attempt of this character in the days of Genseric,
the Vandal name and nation having wound up its career in Africa, sinking
into the sands of that inhospitable continent irrecoverably, unless we
accept the Kabyles as the representatives of their blood. Forty years
ago another Northern race entered upon the task, the misrule of the Arab
and the Turk having apparently prepared the way for a new invasion. The
French pined for an opportunity of testing once more their genius for
colonization, and they selected this time, in place of a wild tract in
America or Oceanica, a region opposite their own shores cultivated and
densely peopled when Gaul was savage, and still occupied by inhabitants
as proud and turbulent as those who proposed to reclaim and reco