ern French, Belgian, Hollander, German, and Russian to be about the same in type and descent; the central French, South German, Swiss, North Italian, Austrian, Servian, and central Russian, to be all the same variety of man; and the southern French, to be closely related to the types of the eastern and western Mediterranean area.
At the present moment the relation of German and Slav is of principal interest. During the period of Teutonic migrations, in the first few centuries of our era, the Slavs settled in the whole region from which Teutonic tribes had moved away. They occupied the whole of what is now eastern Germany. In the Middle Ages, with the growth of the German Empire, a slow backward movement set in. Germans settled as colonists in Slavic territory, and by degrees German speech prevailed over the Slavic. In Germany, survivals of the gradual process may be found in a few remote localities where Slavic speech still persists. As by contact with the more advanced Germans the cultural and economic conditions of the Slav improved, his resistance to Germanization became greater and greater,—earliest among the Czechs and Poles, later in the other Slavic groups.
This process has led to the present distribution of languages, which expresses a fossilization of German colonization in the east, and illustrates in a most striking way the penetration of peoples. Poland and part of Russia, Slavonic and Magyar territories, are interspersed with small German settlements, which are the more sparse and scattered the farther east they are located, the more continuous the nearer they lie to Germany.
With the increased economic and cultural strength of the Slav, the German lost his ability to impose his mode of life upon him, and with it his power to assimi-
