Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/791

Rh character of the population of the Alps varies in direct relation with the physical geography of the country.

The Austrian Tyrol is one of the most favored spots in Europe for the study of the order and succession of the long and the broad heads respectively. It is the geographical center of the continent. It holds strategically the great highway of communication—the Brenner Pass—between the north and the south of Europe. As our map shows, it is also the crest of the great European



watershed. From it flow the Inn River and the Drave into the Danube, thence to the Baltic Sea on the east; the Adige is an affluent of the Po, running due south to the Adriatic; and on the west the branches of the Rhine carry its waters into the Atlantic. Each of these great river systems has marked a line of human immigration and has directed racial movement to this spot. By the Danube the Slavs have come, and by Innsbruck, over the Brenner, the Teutons have passed across into the valley of the Adige and thence directly into the plain of Italy. Back over the same route have flowed many phases of Mediterranean culture into the north from the time of the Phœnicians to the present. The Tyrol, for these reasons, is the one spot in Europe in which racial