s for the earlier
Mediterranean folk the breeding-ground of barbarous outlanders,
forming the chief menace to their circuit of settled civic life. It
is necessary to regard northern Europe and northern Asia as forming
one geographic province. Asia Minor, together with the Euphrates
valley and with Arabia in a lesser degree, belongs to the Mediterranean
area. India and China, with the south-eastern corner of Asia that lies
between them, form another system that will be considered separately
later on.

The Eurasian northland consists naturally, that is to say, where
cultivation has not introduced changes, of four belts. First, to the
southward, come the mountain ranges passing eastwards into high
plateau. Then, north of this line, from the Lower Danube, as far as
China, stretches a belt of grassland or steppe-country at a lower level,
a belt which during the milder periods of the ice-age and immediately
after it must have reached as far as the Atlantic. Then we find, still
farther to the north, a forest belt, well developed in the Siberia
of to-day. Lastly, on the verge of the Arctic sea stretches the tundra,
the frozen soil of which is fertile in little else than the lichen
known as reindeer moss, whilst to the west, as, for instance, in our
islands, moors and bogs represent this zone of barren lands in a milder
form.

The mountain belt is throughout its entire length the home of
round-headed peoples, the so-called Alpine race, which is generally
supposed to have originally come from the high plateau country of Asia.
These round-headed men in western Europe appear where-ever there are
hills, throwing out offshoots by way of the highlands of central France
into Brittany, and even reaching the British Isles. Here they
introduced the use of bronze (an invention possibly acquired by contact
with Egyptians in the near East), though without leaving any marked
traces of themselves amongst the permanent population. At the other
end of Europe they affected Greece by way of a steady though limited
infiltration; whilst in Asia Minor they issued forth from their hills
as the formidable Hittites, the people, by the way, to whom the Jews
are said to owe their characteristic, yet non-Semitic, noses. But are
these round-heads all of one race? Professor Ridgeway has put forward
a rather paradoxical theory to the effect that, just as the long-faced
Boer horse soon evolved in the mountains of Basutoland into a
round-headed pony, so it i