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 196 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

had brought into closest contact the two great currents of ancient thought and culture. Much of the progress of civilization during the succeeding centuries records the conflicts and final fusion of the permanent elements in each.

Roman law owed much to the conjugation of diverse culture- elements. Says Mr. Bryce :

The contact with the Greek republics of Southern Italy in the century before the Punic Wars must have affected the Roman mind and contributed

to the ideas which took shape in the jus gentium The extension of the

sway of Rome over many subject peoples had accustomed the Romans to other legal systems than their own and had led them to create bodies of law in which three elements were blent the purely Roman, the provincial, and those general rules and maxims of common-sense justice and utility which were deemed universally applicable.

Our modern culture owes much to successive fermentations resulting from the contact of diverse elements. While western Christendom was passing through the darkest ages, the Moham- medans took up the Greek science with very great enthusiasm and earnestness, added to it whatever results of a similar sort they could find among any of the other nations with whom they came in contact, and incorporated fresh developments of their own. The treasures of Arabic skill and science, communicated to Christendom through contact with the Moors, resulted in the burst of intellectual activity in the thirteenth century which recorded itself in Scholasticism. Two centuries later began that fertilization of the European mind through direct contact with Greek culture which has fixed the methods and ideals of the thought and science of the modern world.

Nor has the process at the eastern focal point of human cul- ture differed essentially from that at the western. Says Metchnikoff :

Whatever these heterogeneous tribes have of civilized life, Kalmucks of the Russian steppes and Annamites of Tonkin, Tunguses of Siberia, Manchus of the Amur and the Ussuri, mariners of Fokien and Canton, emanates from one and the same center of civilization, the " Land of the Hundred Families." .... Nor can one doubt that if Japan had not had the good fortune to light her torch at the fire of the Celestial Empire, she would per- haps have remained like the Philippines with their Tagals and their Visayas.