intervening alien stocks, though similar in physical type, speech, religion and culture, have no sense of unity, no common political aims, while the appalling list of tribes constituting the population of the country[1396] offers little hope of Afghanistan ever developing national cohesion.  Kafiristan alone, which lies in the Hindu Kush range for the most part at an altitude of 12,000 feet or more, harbors in its recesses many remnants of primitive peoples, speaking various languages and dialects, strangers alike to any native affinity or political union.  It is a mere agglomeration of ethnic fragments, in which the people of one village are often unable to converse with those of the next.[1397] Relief has fashioned the ethnology of the Caucasus in the same way.  No other equally small area in the world contains such a variety of peoples and tongues, differing from one another in race, language, and customs so fundamentally as the Caucasus.  From the heterogeneous survivals of extremely old ethnic stocks, lodged in the high valleys, to the intrusive Russians of the lower piedmont, the Caucasus might be called an ethnographical sample card.[1398]

The rugged configuration of the Alps, from the Rhone to the Danube, has preserved the broad-headed Alpine race, which was perhaps the primitive stock of Central Europe.  The great river valleys leading into this massive highland, like the Rhine, Aar, Inn and Adige, show the intrusion of a long-headed race from both north and south; but lofty and remote valleys off the main routes of travel, like the Hither Rhine about Dissentis, the little Stanzerthal of the upper Inn, and the Passierthal of the upper Adige above Meran, show the race preserved in its purity by the isolating environment.[1399] Here each segregated lateral valley becomes an area of marked linguistic and social differentiation; only where it opens into the wider longitudinal valleys are its peculiarities of speech and custom diluted by the intrusive current of another race.  Switzerland has received three different streams of language, and broken them up into numerous rivulets of dialect.  On its small area of 16,125 square miles (41,346 square kilometers) thirty-five dialects of German are spoken, sixteen of French, eight of Italian and five of Romansch, a primitive and degenerate Latin tongue, surviving from the ancestral days of Roman occupation.[1400] The yet smaller territory of the Tyrol has all these languages except French, whose place is taken by various forms of Slavonic speech, which have entered by the western tributaries of the Danube.[1401]

[Sidenote:  Constriction of mountain areas of ethnic survivals.]