ritual and literature.  Survivals of their nomadic life in Asiatic steppes still persist among the Turks of Europe, after six centuries of sedentary life in the best agricultural land of the Balkan Peninsula.  One of these appears in their choice of meat.  They eat chiefly sheep and goats, beef very rarely, and swine not at all.[29] The first two thrive on poor pastures and travel well, so that they are admirably adapted to nomadic life in arid lands; the last two, far less so, but on the other hand are the regular concomitant of agricultural life.  The Turk’s taste to-day, therefore, is determined by the flocks and herds which he once pastured on the Trans-Caspian plains.  The finished terrace agriculture and methods of irrigation, which the Saracens had learned on the mountain sides of Yemen through a schooling of a thousand years or more, facilitated their economic conquest of Spain.  Their intelligent exploitation of the country’s resources for the support of their growing numbers in the favorable climatic conditions which Spain offered was a light-hearted task, because of the severe training which they had had in their Arabian home.

The origin of Roman political institutions is intimately connected with conditions of the naturally small territory where arose the greatness of Rome.  But now, after two thousand years we see the political impress of this narrow origin spreading to the governments of an area of Europe immeasurably larger than the region that gave it birth.  In the United States, little New England has been the source of the strongest influences modifying the political, religious and cultural life of half a continent; and as far as Texas and California these influences bear the stamp of that narrow, unproductive environment which gave to its sons energy of character and ideals.

[Sidenote:  Transplanted religions.]

Ideas especially are light baggage, and travel with migrant peoples over many a long and rough road.  They are wafted like winged seed by the wind, and strike root in regions where they could never have originated.  Few classes of ideas bear so plainly the geographic stamp of their origin as religious ones, yet none have spread more widely.  The abstract monotheism sprung from the bare grasslands of western Asia made slow but final headway against the exuberant forest gods of the early Germans.  Religious ideas travel far from their seedbeds along established lines of communication.  We have the almost amusing episode of the brawny Burgundians of the fifth century, who received the Arian form of Christianity by way of the Danube highway from the schools of Athens and Alexandria, valiantly supporting the niceties of Greek religious thought against the Roman version of the faith which came up the Rhone Valley.