Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/74

62 map is adapted from his. The modern limits of the Frankish dialect also coincide with it in great part. Here, just outside the Roman walls, the Burgundians, Helvetians, and Franks undoubtedly were massed for a long time.

The Teutons, in invading the territory of the indigenous Alpine population, only succeeded in displacing the aborigines in part. They followed up the rivers, took possession of the open plains; but everywhere else left the natives in relative purity. This accounts in some measure for the great differentiation between people of mountain and plain all over this part of Europe, to which we have constantly adverted. It endows the whole event with the character of a great social movement, rather than of a sudden military occupation. We can not too fully guard against the hasty assumption that this Teutonic expansion was entirely a forcible dispossession of one people by another. It may have been so on the surface; but its results are too universal to be ascribed to that alone. A revolution of opinion is taking place among anthropologists and historians as well to-day, similar to that which was stimulated in geology many years ago by Sir Charles Lyell. That is to say, conceptions of terrific cataclysms, human or geological, producing great results suddenly, are being supplanted by theories of slow-moving causes, working about us to-day, which, acting constantly, almost imperceptibly, in the aggregate are no less mighty in their results. In pursuance of this change of view, students look to-day to present social slow-working movements for the main explanation of the great racial migrations in the past.

We can not resist the conclusion that the Teutonic expansion must be ascribed in part to the relative infertility of the north of Europe; possibly to differences in birth rates, and the like. Population outran the means of support. For a long while its overflow was dammed back by the Roman Empire, until it finally broke over all barriers. It is conceivable that some such contrast as is now apparent between the French and Germans may have been operative then. The Germans are to-day constantly immigrating into northern France—all over the world, in fact—and why? Simply because population is increasing very rapidly; while in France it is practically at a standstill. Another effective force in inducing emigration from the north may have been differences in social customs indirectly due to environmental influences. Thus Baring-Gould has called attention to the contrasts in customs of inheritance which once obtained between the peasants of northern and southern