Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/740

722 for supremacy—viz., the broad-headed Alpine type of central Europe and the true Mediterranean race in the south.

A second reason, no less potent than the first, for the simplicity of the ethnic problems presented in Italy is, of course, its peninsulated structure. All the outlying parts of Europe enjoy a similar isolation. The population of Spain is even more unified than the Italian. The former is probably the most homogeneous in Europe, being almost entirely recruited from the Mediterranean long-headed stock. So entirely similar, in fact, are all the peoples which have invaded or, we had better say, populated the Iberian Peninsula that we are unable to distinguish them anthropologically one from another. The Spaniards are akin to the Berbers in Morocco, Algiers, and Tunis. The division line of races falls at the French-Spanish frontier, as the maps in our last article on the Basques showed in detail. "Beyond the Pyrenees begins Africa" indeed. In Italy a corresponding transition from Europe to Africa takes place, more gradually perhaps but no less surely. It divides the Italian nation into two equal parts, of entirely different racial descent.

Geographically, Italy is constituted of two distinct parts. The basin of the Po, between the Apennines and the Alps, is one of the best defined areas of characterization in Europe. The only place in all the periphery where its boundary is indistinct is on the southeast, from Bologna to Pesaro. Here, for a short distance, one of the little rivers which comes to the sea by Rimini, just north of Pesaro, is the artificial boundary. It was the Rubicon of the ancients, the frontier chosen by the Emperor Augustus between Italy proper and cisalpine Gaul. The second half of the kingdom, no less definitely characterized, lies south of this line in the peninsular portion. Here is where the true Italian language in purity begins, in contradistinction to the Gallo-Italian in the north, as Biondelli long ago proved. The boundaries of this half are clearly marked on the north along the crest of the Apennines, away across to the frontier of France; for the modern provinces of Liguria (see map) belong in flora and fauna, and, as we shall show, in the character of their population, to the southern half