Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/337

Rh distinctly Alpine by race. The character of this culture, its manners and customs, and its skill in the arts, are shown by the accompanying cuts. This is a reproduction of the design upon a bronze "situla" or vessel found at Watsch in the Austrian Tyrol in 1882. A culture capable of such work as this, and possessed of such a civilization to represent, centered in the eastern Alps at a very early time. We are assured, moreover, that the people were overwhelmingly Alpine in racial type. Study of upward of one thousand crania from their graves has made this certain. At the early period when this culture flourished, Scandinavia and Britain were probably in a far lower stage of civilization. Hence if, as we say, the invasion by the broad-headed race had been by force of arms, every advantage would have been on the side of the more civilized race against the primitive possessors of the soil. The clew to the situation would have lain in the relative order in which culture was acquired by the competing populations. It would then have been possible that the Alpine invaders, penetrating far to the west by reason of their equipment of civilization, would have lost their advantage so soon as their rivals learned from them the practical arts of metallurgy and the like. Unfortunately for this supposition, the movement of population was rather an infiltration than a conquest. How may we explain this?

Our solution of the problem as to the temporary supersession of the primitive population of Europe by an invading race, followed by so active a reassertion of rights as to have now relegated the intruder almost entirely to the upland areas of isolation, is rather economic than military or cultural. It rests upon the fundamental laws which regulate density of population in any given area. Our supposition is this: that the north of Europe, the region peculiar to the Teutonic race to-day, is by nature unfitted to provide sustenance to a large and increasing population. In that prehistoric period when a steady influx of population from the east took place, there was yet room for the primitive inhabitants to yield ground to the invader. A time, however, was bound to come when the natural increase of population would saturate that part of Europe, so to speak. A migration of population toward the south, where Nature offered the possibilities of continued existence, consequently ensued. This may have at times taken a military form. It undoubtedly did in the great Teutonic expansion of historic times. Yet it may also have been a gradual expansion—a drifting or swarming forth, ever trending toward the south. We know that such a migration is now taking place. Germans are pressing into northern France as they have