great enough to obliterate almost every cue to the ancient kinship.  The long-headed Teutonic race of northern Europe is regarded now by ethnologists as an offshoot of the long-headed brunette Mediterranean race of African origin, which became bleached out under the pale suns of Scandinavian skies.  The present distribution of the various Teutonic stocks is a geographical fact; their supposed cradle in the Mediterranean basin is a geographical hypothesis.  The connecting links must also be geographical.  They must prove the former presence of the migrating folk in the intervening territory.  A dolichocephalic substratum of population, with a negroid type of skull, has in fact been traced by archaeologists all over Europe through the early and late Stone Ages.  The remains of these aboriginal inhabitants are marked in France, even in sparsely tenanted districts like the Auvergne Plateau, which is now occupied by the broad-headed Alpine race; and they are found to underlie, in point of time, other brachycephalic areas, like the Po Valley, Bavaria and Russia.[235]

The origin of a people can be investigated and stated only in terms of geography.  The problem of origin can be solved only by tracing a people from its present habitat, through the country over which it has migrated, back to its original seat.  Here are three geographical entities which can be laid down upon a map, though seldom with sharply defined boundaries.  They represent three successive geographic locations, all embodying geographic conditions potent to influence the people and their movement.  Hence the geographical element emerges in every investigation as to origins; whether in ethnology, history, philology, mythology or religion.  The transit land, the course between start and finish, is of supreme importance.  Especially is this true for religion, which is transformed by travel.  Christianity did not conquer the world in the form in which it issued from the cramped and isolated environment of Palestine, but only after it had been remodelled in Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and cosmopolized in the wide contact of the Mediterranean basin.  The Roman speech and civilization, which spread through the Romance speaking peoples of Europe, were variously diluted and alloyed before being transplanted by French, Spaniard and Portuguese to American shores, there to be further transformed.

[Sidenote:  Large centers of dispersion.]

In view of the countless springs and tributaries that combine to swell the current of every historical movement, anthropo-geography looks for the origin of a people not in a narrowly defined area, but in a broad, ill-defined center of dispersion, from which many streams simultaneously and successively flow out as from a low-rimmed basin, and which has been filled from many remoter sources.  Autochthones, aborigines are therefore merely scientific tropes, indicating the limit beyond which the movement of people cannot be traced in the gray light of an