of the profits attending the sea-going life, and there began the true Mediterranean phase, which is essentially an era of sea-borne commerce.  Then was the chance for the northern shore with its peninsular configuration.  Carthage on the south shore must be regarded as a bold experiment that did not answer.  The moral, then, would seem to be that the Mediterranean basin proved an ideal nursery for seamen; but only as soon as men were brave and clever enough to take to the sea.  The geographical factor is at least partly consequence as well as cause.

* * * * *

Now let us proceed farther north into what was for the earlier Mediterranean folk the breeding-ground of barbarous outlanders, forming the chief menace to their circuit of settled civic life.  It is necessary to regard northern Europe and northern Asia as forming one geographic province.  Asia Minor, together with the Euphrates valley and with Arabia in a lesser degree, belongs to the Mediterranean area.  India and China, with the south-eastern corner of Asia that lies between them, form another system that will be considered separately later on.

The Eurasian northland consists naturally, that is to say, where cultivation has not introduced changes, of four belts.  First, to the southward, come the mountain ranges passing eastwards into high plateau.  Then, north of this line, from the Lower Danube, as far as China, stretches a belt of grassland or steppe-country at a lower level, a belt which during the milder periods of the ice-age and immediately after it must have reached as far as the Atlantic.  Then we find, still farther to the north, a forest belt, well developed in the Siberia of to-day.  Lastly, on the verge of the Arctic sea stretches the tundra, the frozen soil of which is fertile in little else than the lichen known as reindeer moss, whilst to the west, as, for instance, in our islands, moors and bogs represent this zone of barren lands in a milder form.

The mountain belt is throughout its entire length the home of round-headed peoples, the so-called Alpine race, which is generally supposed to have originally come from the high plateau country of Asia.  These round-headed men in western Europe appear where-ever there are hills, throwing out offshoots by way of the highlands of central France into Brittany, and even reaching the British Isles.  Here they introduced the use of bronze (an invention possibly acquired by contact with Egyptians in the near East), though without leaving any marked traces of themselves amongst the permanent population.  At the other end of Europe they affected Greece by way of a steady though limited infiltration; whilst in Asia Minor they issued forth from their hills as the formidable Hittites, the people, by the way, to whom the Jews are said to owe their characteristic, yet non-Semitic, noses.  But are these round-heads all of one race?  Professor Ridgeway has put forward a rather paradoxical theory to the