Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/381

Rh temperature, the falling away of the leaves temporarily drying out the tree by checking the transpiration current and thus preventing the disastrous effects of freezing. Along the warmer Gulf borders certain deciduous types, as the live oaks, have either never acquired the habit or have lost it since glacial times.

A glamour of romance brooded over this forest land and cast its spell on the mind of western Europe. From Raleigh, dreaming of colonies beyond the sea, down to the days of the great exodus of European peoples there was a pervading sense of wonder concerning the new country. History has dealt at length with the motives that prompted whole bodies of people to leave a long-familiar and civilized homeland for an unknown and untried wilderness. No matter what the varied motives may have been—whether from religious or political oppression, or for the betterment of home and fortune—each and all were expressions of that migratory impulse that from a remote period had been working out the destiny of the race.

The English stock that colonized the Atlantic slope of North America was made up of two strains of blood that had mingled to some extent in the mother country, but which was destined to a far wider and more complete fusion in the new world. From an ethnological point of view the Welsh, the Irish and the Highland Scot or Gael have come to be regarded as the modern representatives of an ancient Celtic people that once occupied Britain and that were driven into remote corners of the land by the invading Angle and his allies. As applied to this people and its speech and literature the word "Celtic" has come to stand for a certain kind of temperament—imaginative and emotional in its nature, poetic and inclined to mysticism, a man on the edge of things, elated or cast down, and capable of great bursts of energy. The reverse of this picture is called up by the word "Teutonic "—the opposite strain of blood that has mingled so largely with the Celtic element in the moulding of an American type. In point of fact the Teutonic is the dominant strain in most of us to-day; the Celtic being more of a local infusion here and there, like the occasional brook flowing into the main stream of a river. The New England Puritans were almost wholly English Teutons and the same was true of the Virginia colonists. The Teutonic Swede and Hollander held for a time the middle region—the Hudson and the lower valley of the Delaware—and left an infusion of their blood in the dominant English population which may still be traced in certain family names. The Quakers that settled Pennsylvania were, like the Puritans, of Teutonic English stock. The Scotch-Irish peoples, likewise largely Teutonic, settled the Carolina seaboard. The main German migration spread through the middle region—in the Delaware and Susquehanna