Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/474

456 may indeed become a factor in the physical sense, especially when re-enforced by language. It can not be denied that assimilation in blood often depends upon identity of speech, or that political frontiers sometimes coincide with a racial differentiation of population. The canton of Schaffhausen lies north of the Rhine, a deep inset into the grand duchy of Baden, yet its people, though isolated from their Swiss countrymen across the river, are intensely patriotic. In race as in political affairs they are distinctly divided from their immediate German neighbors. Mentally holding to the Swiss people, they have unconsciously generated a physical individuality akin to them as well. Thus it is possible that a sense of nationality once aroused may become an active factor through selection in the anthropological sense. Nevertheless, this phenomenon requires more time than most political history has at its disposition, so that in the main our proposition remains true. Despite the political hatred of the French for the German, no appreciable effect in a physical sense has yet resulted, nor will it until the lapse of generations.

Consideration of our linguistic map of the southwest of Europe will serve to illustrate some of the potent political influences which make for community of language without thereby indicating any influence of race. The Iberian Peninsula, now divided between two nationalities, the Spanish and the Portuguese, is, as we shall subsequently show, in the main homogeneous racially—more so, in fact, than any other equally large area of Europe. The only exception is in the case of the Basques, whom we must consider by themselves. This physically uniform population, exclusive of the Basque, makes use to-day of three distinct languages, all Romance or Latin in their origin, to be sure, but so far differentiated from one another as to be mutually unintelligible. It is said, for example, that the Castilian peasant can more readily understand Italian than the dialect of his neighbor and compatriot, the Catalan. The gap between the Portuguese and the Castilian or true Spanish is less deep and wide, perhaps; but the two are still very distinct and radically different from the language spoken in the eastern provinces of Spain. The Catalan speech is, as the related tints upon our map imply, only a sub-variety of the Provencal or southern French language. The people of the Balearic Islands speaking this Catalan tongue differ from the French in language but little more than do the Corsicans.