[Sidenote:  Cultural modification during migration.]

The absorption of foreign elements is not confined to large groups whose names come down in history, nor is the ensuing modification one of blood alone.  Every land migration or expansion of a people passes by or through the territories of other peoples; by these it is inevitably influenced in point of civilization, and from them individuals are absorbed into the wandering throng by marriage or adoption, or a score of ways.  This assimilation of blood and local culture is facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of historical movements are slow, a leisurely drift.  Even the great Voelkerwanderung, which history has shown us generally in the moment of swift, final descent upon the imperial city, in reality consisted of a succession of advances with long halts between.  The Vandals, whose original seats were probably in central or eastern Prussia, drifted southward with the general movement of the German barbarians toward the borders of the Empire late in the second century, and, after the Marcomannic War (175 A.D.), settled in Dacia north of the lower Danube under the Roman sway.  In 271 they were located on the middle Danube, and sixty years afterwards in Moravia.  Later they settled for seventy years in Pannonia within the Empire, where they assimilated Roman civilization and adopted the Arian form of Christianity from their Gothic neighbors.[150] In Spain, as we have seen, they occupied Galicia and Andalusia for a time before passing over into Africa in 429.  Here was a migration lasting two centuries and a half, reaching from the Baltic to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, starting on the bleak sterile plains of the north amid barbarous neighbors, ending in the sunny grain fields and rich cities of Roman Africa.  The picture which we get of the victorious Vandals parceling out the estates of Roman nobles, and, from the standpoint of their more liberal faith, profiting by the dissensions of the two Catholic sects of Africa, shows us a people greatly modified by their long sweep through the civilized outskirts of the Empire.  So it was with the Lombards and Goths who invaded Italy.

Among primitive tribes, who move in smaller groups and must conform closely to the dictates of their environment, the modifying effects of people and land through which they pass are conspicuous.  Ratzel describes the gradual withdrawal of a Hottentot people from western Cape Colony far into the arid interior before the advance of Kaffirs and Europeans by saying:  “The stock and name of the Namaquas wandered northward, acquiring new elements, and in course of time filling the old mold with new contents."[151] This is the typical result of such primitive movements.  The migration of the Delaware Indians from an early home somewhere northwest of the Great Lakes to their historical habitat between the Hudson and Potomac Rivers was a slow progress, which somewhere brought them into contact with maize-growing tribes, and gave them their start in agriculture.[152] The transit lands through which these great race journeys pass exercise a modifying effect chiefly through their culture and their peoples, less through their physical features and climate.  For that the stay of the visitants is generally too brief.