As a rule it is the new-comers who hold the coast, but occasionally the coast-dwellers represent the older ethnic stock.  In the Balkan Peninsula to-day the descendants of the ancient Hellenes are, with few exceptions, confined to the coast.  The reason is to be found in the fact that the Slavs and other northern races who have intruded by successive invasions from the plains of southern Russia are primarily inland peoples, and therefore have occupied the core of the peninsula, forcing the original Greek population before them to the edge of the sea.[490] This is the same anthropo-geographical process which makes so many peninsulas the last halting-place of a dislodged earlier race.  But the Greeks who line the northern and western shores of Asiatic Turkey are such only in language and religion, because their prevailing broad head-form shows them to be Turks and Armenians in race stock.[491]

Sometimes the distinction of race between coast and interior is obliterated so far as language and civilization are concerned, but survives less conspicuously in head-form and pigmentation.  The outermost fringe of the Norwegian coast, from the extreme south to the latitude of Trondhjem in the north, is occupied by a broad-headed, round-faced, rather dark people of only medium height, who show decided affinities with the Alpine race of Central Europe, and who present a marked contrast to the tall narrow-headed blondes of pure Teutonic type, constituting the prevailing population from the inner edge of the coast eastward into Sweden.  This brachycephalic, un-Germanic stock of the Norwegian seaboard seems to represent the last stand made by that once wide-spread Alpine race, which here has been shoved along to the rocky capes and islands of the outer edge by a later Teutonic immigration coming from Sweden.[492] So the largest continuous area of Negrito stock in the Philippines is found in the Sierra Madre mountains defining the eastern coast of northern Luzon.[493] Facing the neighborless wastes of the Pacific, whence no new settler could come, turned away from the sources of Malay immigration to the southwest, its location made it a retreat, rather than a gateway to incoming races. [See map page 147.]

[Sidenote:  Ethnic amalgamations in coastlands.]

Where an immigrant population from oversea lands occupies the coastal hem of a country, rarely do they preserve the purity of their race.  Coming at first with marauding or trading intent, they bring no women with them, but institute their trading stations or colonies by marriage with the women of the country.  The ethnic character of the resultant population depends upon the proportion of the two constituent elements, the nearness or remoteness of their previous kinship, and the degree of innate race antagonism.  The ancient Greek elements which crossed the Aegean from different sections of the peninsula to colonize the Ionian coast of Asia Minor mingled with the native Carian, Cretan, Lydian, Pelasgian, and Phoenician populations which they found there.[494] On all the barbarian shores where the Greeks established themselves, there arose a mixed race—­in Celtic Massilia, in Libyan Barca, and in Scythian Crimea—­but always a race Hellenized, born interpreters and mercantile agents.[495]