A people situated between two other peoples form an ethnic and cultural link between the two.  The transitional type is as familiar in anthropo-geography as in biology.  The only exception is found in the young intrusion of a migrating or conquering people, like that of the Hungarians and Turks in southeastern Europe, and of the Berger Tuaregs and Fulbes among the negroes of western Sudan; or of a colonizing people, like that of the Russians in Mongolian Siberia and of Europeans among the aborigines of South Africa.  Even in these instances race amalgamation tends to take place along the frontiers, as was the case in Latin America and as occurs to-day in Alaska and northern Canada, where the “squaw man” is no rarity.  The assimilation of culture, at least in a superficial sense, may be yet more rapid, especially where hard climatic conditions force the interloper to imitate the life of the native.  The industrial and commercial Hollander, when transplanted to the dry grasslands of South Africa, became pastoral like the native Kaffirs.  The French voyageur of Canada could scarcely be distinguished from the Indian trapper; occupation, food, dress, and spouse were the same.  Only a lighter tint of skin distinguished the half-breed children of the Frenchman.  The settlers of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths, at least for a generation or two, showed little outward difference in mode of life from that of the savage community among which they dwelt.[242]

[Sidenote:  Vicinal groups of similar or diverse race and culture.]

The more alike the components of such a vicinal group of people, the easier, freer and more effective will be the mediating function of the central one.  Germany has demonstrated this in her long history as intermediary between the nations of southeastern and western Europe.  The people of Poland, occupying a portion of the Baltic slope of northern Europe, fended by no natural barriers from their eastern and western neighbors, long constituted a transition form between the two.  Though affiliated with Russia in point of language, the Poles are Occidental in their religion; and their head-form resembles that of northern Germany rather than that of Russia.[243] The country belongs to western Europe in the density of its population (74 to the square kilometer or 190 to the square mile), which is quadruple that of remaining European Russia, and also in its industrial and social development.  The partition of Poland among the three neighboring powers was the final expression of its intermediate location and character.[244] One part was joined politically to the Slav-German western border of Russia, and another to the German-Slav border of Germany, while the portion that fell to the Austrian Empire simply extended the northern Slav area of that country found in Bohemia, Moravia, and the Slovak border of Hungary. [Map page 223.]

If the intermediate people greatly differs in race or civilization from both neighbors, it exercises and receives slight influence.  The Mongols of Central Asia, between China on one side and Persia and India on the other, have been poor vehicles for the exchange of culture between these two great districts.  The Hungarians, located between the Roumanians and Germans on the east and west, Slovaks and Croatians on the north and south, have helped little to reconcile race differences in the great empire of the Danube.