Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/481

Rh the contact of two distinct cultures is to produce stratification. The common people become the conservators of the old; the upper classes hold to the new. It is a case of folklore and superstition versus progressive ideas. Here, as in respect of language, arts and customs become reliable as a test of race only when found fixed in the soil or in some other way prevented from migration.

Furthermore, let us not attach too much importance to the statements of historical and classical writers in their accounts of migrations and of conquests. We should beware of the travelers' tales of the ancients. Pliny describes a people of Africa with no heads and with eyes and mouth in the breast—a statement which to the anthropologist appears to be open to the suspicion of exaggeration. Even when conquest has undoubtedly taken place, it does not imply a change of physical type in the region affected. We are dealing with great masses of men near the soil to whom it matters little whether the emperor be Macedonian, Roman, or Turk. Till comparatively recent times the peasantry of Europe were as little affected by changes of dynasty as the Chinese people have been touched by the recent war in the East. To them personally, victory or defeat meant little except a change of tax-gatherers.

In this connection it should be borne in mind that conquest often affected but a small area of each country—namely, its richest and most populous portions. The foreigner seldom penetrated the outlying districts. He went, as did the Spaniards in South America, where gold was gathered in the great cities. France, as we know, was affected very unevenly by the Roman conquest. It was not the portion nearest to Rome, but the richest though remote one, which yielded to the Roman rule to the greatest extent. At all events, the Roman colonists in Gaul and Brittany have disappeared, to leave no trace. The Vandals in Africa have left no sign—neither hide nor hair, in a literal sense—nor is there evidence of the long English rule in Aquitaine. The Burgundian kingdom was changed merely in respect to its rulers; and spots in Italy like Benevento, ruled by the Lombards for five hundred years, are to-day precisely like all the region round about them.

The truth is that migrations or conquests to be physically effective must be domestic and not military. Colonization must take place by wholesale, and it must include men, women, and children. The Roman conquests seldom proceeded thus, in sharp contrast to the people of the East, who migrated in hordes, colonizing incidentally on the way. England was not affected by her Roman invasion, nor until the Teutons came by thousands. In anthropology as in jurisprudence, possession is nine points of