The cheapness and ease of river travel have tended to check or delay the construction of highroads and railways, where facilities for inland navigation have been abundant, and later to regulate railway freight charges. Conversely, riverless lands have everywhere experienced an exaggerated and precocious railroad development, and have suffered from its monopoly of transportation. Even canals have in most lands had a far earlier date than paved highroads. This has been true of Spain, France, Holland, and England.674 In the Hoang-ho Valley of northern China where waterways are restricted, owing to the rapid current and shallowness of this river, highroads are comparatively common; but they are very rare in central and southern China where navigable rivers and canals abound.675 New England, owing to its lack of inland navigation, was the first part of the United States to develop a complete system of turnpikes and later of railroads. On the other hand, the great river valleys of America have generally slighted the highroad phase of communication, and slowly passed to that of railroads. The abundance of natural waterways in Russia—51,800 miles including canals—has contributed to the retardation of railroad construction.676 The same thing is true in the Netherlands, where 4875 miles (7863 kilometers) of navigable waterways677 in an area of only 12,870 square miles (33,000 square kilometers) have kept the railroads down to a paltry 1818 miles (2931 kilometers); but smaller Belgium, commanding only 1375 miles (3314 kilometers) of waterway and stimulated further by a remarkable industrial and commercial development, has constructed 4228 miles (6819 kilometers) of railroad.

If we compare the countries of Central and South America, where railroads are still mere adjuncts of river and coastwise routes, a stage of development prevalent in the United States till 1858, we find an unmistakable relation between navigable waterways and railroad mileage. The countries with ample or considerable river communication, like Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and Paraguay, are all relatively slow in laying railroads as compared with Mexico and Argentine, even when allowance is made for differences of zonal location, economic development, and degree of European elements in their respective populations. Mexico and Argentine, having each an area only about one-fourth that of Brazil but a railroad mileage nearly one-fourth greater, have been pushed to this development primarily by a common lack of inland navigation. Similarly South Africa, stricken with poverty of water communication south of the Zambesi, has constructed 7500 miles of railroads678 in spite of the youth of the country and the sparsity of its white population. Similar geographic conditions have forced the mileage of Australian railways up to twice that of South Africa, in a country which is still in the pastoral and agricultural stage of development, and whose most densely populated province Victoria has only fourteen inhabitants to the square mile. In the almost unpeopled wastes of Trans-Caspia, where two decades ago the camel was the only carrier, the Russian railroad has worked a commercial revolution by stimulating production and affording an outlet for the irrigated districts of the encircling mountains.679 In our own Trans-Missouri country, where the scanty volume of the streams eliminated all but the Missouri itself as a dependable waterway, even for the canoe travel of the early western trappers, railroads have developed unchecked by the competition of river transportation.680 With no rival nearer than the Straits of Magellan and the Isthmus of Panama for transportation between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast, they have fixed their own charges on a monopoly basis, and have fought the construction of the Isthmian Canal.

A river system is a system of communication. It therefore makes a bond of union between the people living among its remoter sources and those settled at its mouth. Every such river system forms geographically an unbroken whole. Only where a wild, torrent-filled gorge, like the Brahmaputra's path through the Himalayas, interrupts communication between the upper and lower course, is human life in the two sections divorced. But such cases are rare. Even the River Jhelam, which springs with mad bounds from the lofty Vale of Kashmir through the outer range of the Himalayas down to its junction with the Indus, carries quantities of small logs to be used as railway sleepers; and though it shatters a large per cent. of them, it makes a link between the lumber men of the Kashmir forests and British railroad engineers in the treeless plains of the Indus.681

In arid lands, where the scant and variable streams are useless for navigation, but invaluable for irrigation, a rival interest in the limited water supply leads almost inevitably to conflict, and often to the political union of the peoples holding the upper and lower courses, in order to secure adjustment of their respective claims. The ancient Salassi of the upper Doria Baltea Valley in the Alps drew off all the water of the stream for washing gold, and thus deprived the agricultural people lower down the valley of the water necessary for irrigation. The result was frequent wars between the two tribes.682 The offensive is taken by the downstream people, whose fields and gardens suffer from every extension of tillage or increase of population in the settlements above them. Occasionally a formal agreement is a temporary expedient. The River Firenze and other streams watering southern Trans-Caspia have their sources in the mountains of northern Persia; hence the Russians, in the boundary convention with Persia of 1881, stipulated that no new settlement be established along these streams within Persian territory, no extension of land under cultivation beyond the present amount, and no eduction of the water beyond that necessary to irrigate the existing fields.683 Russia's designs upon Afghanistan aim not only at access to India, but also at the control of the upper Murghab River, on whose water depends the prosperity of the Pendjeh and Merv oases.684 In such regions the only logical course is the extension of the political frontier to the watershed, a principle which Russia is applying in western Asia, and which California applied in drawing her eastern boundary to include even Goose Lake.

Rivers unite. Ancient Rome grew up on both banks of the Tiber, and extended her commercial and political supremacy up and down stream. Both sides of the Rhine were originally occupied by the Gallic tribes, whose villages were in some instances bisected by the river. Cæsar found the Menapii, a Belgian people on the lower Rhine, with their fields, farmhouses and villages on both banks.685 Then the westward advance of the Teutonic tribes gradually transformed the Rhine into a German river, from the island of Batavia at its mouth up to the great elbow at the foot of the Jura Mountains.686 To the American Indians even the widest rivers were no barriers. Christopher Gist, exploring the Ohio in 1751, found a Shawnee village situated on both sides of the river below the mouth of the Scioto, with about a hundred houses on the north bank and forty on the south.687 The small and unique nation of the Mandan Indians were found by Lewis and Clark near the northern bend of the Missouri in 1804, in two groups of villages on opposite sides of the river. They had previously in 1772 occupied nine villages lower down the stream, two on the east bank and seven on the west.688 The Connecticut River settlers of early colonial days laid out all their towns straight across the valley, utilizing the alluvial meadows on both banks for tillage, the terraces for residence sites, and the common river for intercourse.689

Every river tends to become a common artery feeding all the life of its basin, and gradually obliterating ethnic and cultural differences among the peoples of its valley. The Nile, with its narrow hem of flood-plain on either bank and barrier sands beyond, has so linked race and history in Egypt and Nubia, that the two countries cannot be separated. A common highway from mountains to sea, a common frontier of trackless desert have developed here a blended similarity of race, language and culture from the delta to Kordofan. The Hamitic race seems to have originated in the south and migrated northward down the Nile towards the delta. Later the whole valley, north and south, received the same Semitic or Arab immigration, which spread from Cairo to the old Sudanese capital of Sennar, while a strain of negro blood has filtered in from the equatorial black belt and followed the current down to the sea.690 The culture of the valley originated in Lower Egypt, and, with that easy transmissibility which characterizes ideas, it moved upstream into Ethiopia, which never evolved a culture of its own. Just as noticeable is the political interplay. The rule of the Pharaohs extended far up the Nile, at times to the Third Cataract at 20° N.L.; and at one period Ethiopian kings extended their sway over Egypt. At another, a large body of mutinous Egyptian soldiers abandoned their country and their wives, and emigrated along the one line of slight resistance open to them into Ethiopia, to found there a new state and new families by marriage with native women, thus contributing to the amalgamation of races in the valley.

The most pronounced types of the identity of a country with a river valley are found where strongly marked geographical boundaries, like deserts and mountains, emphasize the inner unity of the basins by accentuating their isolation from without. This is especially the case in high mountain regions; here canton or commune or county coincides with the river valley. Population hugs the margins of the streams where alone is soil fit for cultivation, and fairly level land suitable for dwellings. Above are the unoccupied heights, at once barrier and boundary. In the Alps, Salzburg is approximately identical with the valley of the Salzach, Uri with that of the Reuss, the Valais with the upper Rhone, the Engadine with the upper Inn, Glarus with the Linth, Graubünden or Grisons with the upper Rhine, Valtellina with the Adda. So in the great upheaved area of the Himalayas, the state of Kashmir was originally the valley of the upper Jhelam River, while Assam, in its correct delimitation, is the valley of the Brahmaputra between the Himalayan gorge and the swamps of Bengal.691

In mountain regions which are also arid, the identity of a district with a stream basin becomes yet more pronounced, because here population must gather about the common water supply, must organize to secure its fair distribution, and cooperate in the construction of irrigation channels to make the distribution as economical and effective as possible. Thus in Chinese Turkestan, the districts of Yarkand, Kashgar, Aksu and Kut-sha are identical with as many mountain tributaries of the Tarim, whose basin in turn comprises almost the whole of Chinese Turkestan.

From the uniting power of rivers it follows that they are poor boundaries. Only mountains and seas divide sharply enough to form scientific frontiers. Rivers may serve as political lines of demarcation and therefore fix political frontiers; but they can never take the place of natural boundaries. A migrating or expanding people tend always to occupy both slopes of a river valley. They run their boundary of race or language across the axis of their river basin, only under exceptional circumstances along the stream itself. The English-French boundary in the St. Lawrence Valley crosses the river in a broad transitional zone of mingled people and speech in and above the city of Montreal. The French-German linguistic frontier in Switzerland crosses the upper Rhone Valley just above Sierre, but the whole canton of Valais above the elbow of the river at Martigny shows fundamental ethnic unity, indicated by identity of head form, stature and coloring.692 Where the Elbe flows through the low plains of North Germany, its whole broad valley is occupied by a pure Teutonic population—fair, tall, long-headed; a more brunette type occupies its middle course across the uplands of Saxony, and speaks German like the downstream folk; but its upper course, hemmed in by the Erz and Riesen Mountains, shows the short, dark and broad-headed people of the Bohemian basin, speaking the Czech language.693 On the Danube, too, the same thing is true. The upper stream is German in language and predominantly Alpine in race stock down to the Austro-Hungarian boundary; from this point to the Drave mouth it is Hungarian; and from the Drave to the Iron Gate it is Serbo-Croatian on both banks.694 Lines of ethnic demarcation, therefore, cut the Elbe and Danube transversely, not longitudinally. [See map page 223.]

The statements of Cæsar and Pliny that the Seine and Marne formed the boundary between the Gauls and Belgians, and the Garonne that between the Gauls and Aquitanians, must be accepted merely as general and preliminary; for exceptions are noted later in the text. Parisii, for instance, were represented as holding both banks of the Seine and Marne at their confluence, and the Gallic Bituriges were found on the Aquitanian side of the Garonne estuary.

Only under peculiar conditions do rivers become effective as ethnic, tribal or political boundaries. Most often it is some physiographic feature which makes the stream an obstacle to communication, and lends it the character of a scientific boundary. The division of the Alpine foreland of southern Germany first into tribal and later into political provinces by the Iller, Lech, Inn, and Salzach can be ascribed in part to the tumultuous course of these streams from the mountains to the Danube, which renders them useless for communication.695 The lower Danube forms a well maintained linguistic boundary between the Bulgarians and Roumanians, except in the northwest corner of Bulgaria, where the hill country between the Timok River and the Danube has enticed a small group of Roumanians across to the southern side. From this point down the stream, a long stretch of low marshy bank on the northern side, offering village sites only at the few places where the loess terrace of Roumania comes close to the river, exposed to overflows, strewn with swamps and lakes, and generally unfit for settlement, has made the Danube an effective barrier.696 Similarly, the broad, sluggish Shannon River, which spreads out to lake breadth at close intervals in its course across the boggy central plain of Ireland, has from the earliest times proved a sufficient barrier to divide the plain into two portions, Connaught and Meath,697 contrasted in history, in speech and to some extent even in race elements.698 A different cause gave the Thames its unique rôle among the larger English rivers as a boundary between counties from source to mouth. London's fortified position at the head of the Thames estuary closed this stream as a line of invasion to the early Saxons, and forced them to make detours to the north and south of the river, which therefore became a tribal boundary.699

Where navigation is peculiarly backward, a river may present a barrier. An instructive instance is afforded by the River Yo, which flows eastward through northern Bornu into Lake Chad, and serves at once as boundary and protection to the agricultural tribes of the Kanuri against the depredations of the Tibbu robbers living in the Sahara or the northern grassland. But during the dry season from April to August, when the trickling stream is sucked up by the thirsty land and thirstier air, the Tibbu horsemen sweep down on the unprotected Kanuri and retreat with their booty across the vanished barrier. The primitive navigation by reed or brushwood rafts, practiced in this almost streamless district, affords no means of retreat for mounted robbers; so the raiding season opens with the fall of the river.700

For political boundaries, which are often adopted with little reference to race distribution, rivers serve fairly well. They are convenient lines of demarcation and strategic lines of defense, as is proved by the military history of the Rhine, Danube, Ebro, Po, and countless other streams. On the lower Zambesi Livingstone found the territories of the lesser chiefs defined by the rivulets draining into the main river. The leader of the Makololo formally adopted the Zambesi as his political and military frontier, though his people spread and settled beyond the river.701 Long established political frontiers may become ethnic boundaries, more or less distinct, because of protracted political exclusion. To the Romans, the Danube and Rhine as a northeastern frontier had the value chiefly of established lines in an imperfectly explored wilderness, and of strategic positions for the defense of an oft assailed border; but the long maintenance of this political frontier resulted in the partial segregation and hence differentiation of the people dwelling on the opposite banks.

Poor as a scientific boundary, a river is not satisfactory even as a line of demarcation, because of its tendency to shift its bed in every level stretch of its course. A political boundary that follows a river, therefore, is often doomed to frequent surveys. The plantations on the meanders of the lower Mississippi are connected now with one, now with the other of the contiguous states, as the great stream straightens its course after the almost annual overflow.702 The Rio Grande has proved a troublesome and expensive boundary between the United States and Mexico. Almost every rise sees it cutting a new channel for itself, now through Texas, now through Mexican territory, occasioning endless controversies as to the ownership of the detached land, and demanding fresh surveys. Recent changes in the lower course of the Helmund between Nasralabad and the Sistan Swamp, which was adopted in 1872 as the boundary between Afghanistan and Persia, have necessitated a new demarcation of the frontier; and on this task a commission is at present engaged.703 In a like manner Strabo tells us that the River Achelous, forming the boundary between ancient Acarnania and Aetolia in western Hellas, by overflowing its delta region, constantly obliterated the boundaries agreed upon by the two neighbors, and thereby gave rise to disputes that were only settled by force of arms.704

Rivers tend always to be centers of population, not outskirts or perimeters. They offer advantages that have always attracted settlement—fertile alluvial soil, a nearby water supply, command of a natural highway for intercourse with neighbors and access to markets. Among civilized peoples fluvial settlements have been the nuclei of broad states, passing rapidly through an embryonic development to a maturity in which the old center can still be distinguished by a greater density of population. Only among savages or among civilized people who have temporarily reverted to primitive conditions in virgin colonial lands, do we find genuine riverine folk, whose existence is closely restricted to their bordering streams. The river tribes of the Congo occupy the banks or the larger islands, while the land only three or four miles back from the stream is held by different tribes with whom the riverine people trade their fish. The latter are expert fishermen and navigators, and good agriculturists, raising a variety of fruits and vegetables. On the river banks at regular intervals are market greens, neutral ground, whither people come from up and down stream and from the interior to trade. Their long riparian villages consist of a single street, thirty feet wide and often two miles long, on which face perhaps three hundred long houses,705 Fisher and canoe people line the Welle, the great northern tributary of the Congo.706 The same type appeared in South America in the aboriginal Caribs and Tupis dwelling along the southern tributaries of the Amazon and the affluents of the Paraguay. These were distinctly a water race, having achieved a meager development only in navigation, fishing and the cultivation of their alluvial soil.707 The ancient mound-builders of America located their villages chiefly, though not exclusively, along the principal watercourses, like the Mississippi, Illinois, Miami, Wabash, Wisconsin, and Fox,708 on the very streams later dotted by the trading posts of the French voyageurs.

The Riparian Villages Of The Lower St. Lawrence.

On this water thoroughfare every dwelling faced. Hence land on the river was at a premium, while that two miles back was to be had for the taking. The original grants measured generally 766 feet in width and 7,660 in depth inland; but when bequeathed from generation to generation, they were divided up along lines running back at right angles to the all important waterway. Hence each habitant farm measured its precious river-front by the foot and its depth by the mile, while the cabins were ranged side by side in cosy neighborliness. The côte type of village, though eminently convenient for the Indian trade, was ill adapted for government and defense against the savages; but the need for the communication supplied by the river was so fundamental, that it nullified all efforts of the authorities to concentrate the colonists in more compact settlements. Parkman says: "One could have seen almost every house in Canada by paddling a canoe up the St. Lawrence and Richelieu."709 The same type of land-holding can be traced to-day on the Chaudiere River, where the fences run back from the stream like the teeth of a comb. It is reproduced on a larger scale in the long, narrow counties ranged along the lower St. Lawrence, whose shape points to the old fluvial nuclei of settlement. Similarly the early Dutch grants on the Hudson gave to the patroons four miles along the river and an indefinite extension back from the stream. In the early Connecticut River settlements, the same consideration of a share in the river and its alluvial bottoms distributed the town lots among the inhabitants in long narrow strips running back from the banks.710

In undeveloped countries, where rivers are the chief highways, we occasionally see the survival of a distinct race of boatmen amid an intruding people of different stock, preserved in their purity by their peculiar occupation, which has given them the aloofness of a caste. In the Kwang-tung province of southern China are 40,000 Tanka boat people, who live in boats and pile-dwellings in the Canton River. The Chinese, from whom they are quite distinct, regard them as a remnant of the original population, which was dislodged by their invasion and forced to take refuge on the water. They gradually established intercourse with the conquerors of the land, but held themselves aloof. They marry only among themselves, have their own customs, and enjoy a practical monopoly of carrying passengers and messages between the steamers and the shore at Macao, Hongkong and Canton.711 In the same way, the middle Niger above Gao possesses a distinct aquatic people, the Somnos or Bosos, who earn their living as fishermen and boatmen on the river. They spread their villages along the Niger and its tributaries, and occupy separate quarters in the large towns like Gao and Timbuctoo. They are creatures of the river rather than of the land, and show great skill and endurance in paddling and poling their narrow dugouts on their long Niger voyages.712

Reference has been made before to the large river population of China who live on boats and rafts, and forward the trade of the vast inland waterways. These are people, differentiated not in race, but in occupation and mode of life, constantly recruited from the congested population of the land. Allied to them are the trackers or towing crews whose villages form a distinctive feature of the turbulent upper Yangtze, and who are employed, sometimes three hundred at a time, to drag junks up the succession of rapids above Ichang.713 Similarly the complex of navigable waterways centering about Paris, as far back as the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, gave rise to the Nautae Parisii or guild of mariners, from whom the city of Paris derived its present coat of arms—a vessel under full sail. These Lutetian boatmen handled the river traffic in all the territory drained by the Seine, Marne, and Oise. Later, in the reign of Louis the Fat, they were succeeded by the Mercatores aquae Parisiaci, and from them sprang the municipal body appointed to regulate the river navigation and commerce.714

The location of the ancient tribe of the Parisii is typical of many other weak riverine folk who seek in the islands of a river a protected position to compensate for their paucity of number. The Parisii, one of the smallest of the Gallic tribes, ill-matched against their populous neighbors, took refuge on ten islands and sandbars of the Seine and there established themselves.715 Stanley found an island in the Congo near the second cataract of Stanley Falls occupied by five villages of the Baswa, who had taken refuge there from the attacks of the bloodthirsty Bakuma.716 During the Tartar invasions of Russia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bands of refugees from the surrounding country gathered for mutual defense on the islands of the Dnieper River, and became the nucleus of the Dnieper Cossacks.717 The Huron tribe of American Indians, reduced to a mere fragment by repeated Iroquois attacks, fled first to the islands of St. Joseph and Michilimackinac in Lake Huron, and in 1856 to the Isle of Orleans in the St. Lawrence. But even this location under the guns of their French allies in Quebec failed to protect them, for the St. Lawrence was a highway for the war fleets of their implacable foe.718

A river island not only confers the negative benefit of protection, but affords a coign of vantage for raids on the surrounding country, being to some extent proof against punitive attacks. It offers special facilities for depredations on parties crossing the river; here the divided current, losing something of its force, is less of an obstacle, and the island serves as a resting place on the passage. Immunity from punishment breeds lawlessness. The Ba Toka who, fifty years ago, inhabited the islands in the great southern bend of the Zambesi, utilized their location to lure wandering tribes on to their islands, under the pretext of ferrying them across, and then to rob them, till Sebituane, the great Makololo chief, cleaned out their fastnesses and opened the river for trade.719 The islands in the wide stretches of the Lualaba River in the Babemba country were described to Livingstone as harboring a population of marauders and robbers, who felt themselves safe from attack.720 The same unenviable reputation attaches to the Budumas of the Lake Chad islands. A weak, timid, displaced people, they nevertheless lose no chance of raiding the herds of the Sudanese tribes inhabiting the shores of the Lake, and carrying off the stolen cattle on their wretched rafts to their island retreats.721

The protection of an island location is almost equalled in the peninsulas formed by the serpentines or meanders of a river. Hence these are choice sites for fortress or settlement in primitive communities, where hostilities are always imminent and rivers the sole means of communication. The defensive works of the mound-builders in great numbers occupied such river peninsulas. The neck of the loop was fortified by a single or double line of ditch and earthen wall, constructed from bank to bank of the encircling stream.722 This was exactly the location of Vesontio, now Besançon, once the ancient stronghold of the Sequani in eastern Gaul. It was situated in a loop of the Dubis, so nearly a circle that its course seems to have been "described by a compass," Cæsar says, while fortifications across the isthmus made the position of the town almost impregnable.723 Verona, lying at the exit of the great martial highway of the Brenner Pass, occupies just such a loop of the Adige, as does Capua on the Volturno, and Berne on the Aare. Shrewsbury, in the Middle Ages an important military point for the preservation of order on the marches of Wales, is almost encircled by the River Severn, while a castle on the neck of the peninsula completes the defense on the land side.724 Graaf Reinett, at one time an exposed frontier settlement of the Dutch in Cape Colony, had a natural moat around it in the Sunday River, which here describes three-fourths of a circle.

The need of protection felt by all colonists in new countries amid savage or barbarous people whom encroachment sooner or later makes hostile, leads them if possible to place their first trading posts and settlements on river islands, especially at the mouth of the streams, where a delta often affords the site required, and where the junction of ocean and river highway offers the best facilities for trade. A river island fixed the location of the English settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, the French at Montreal and New Orleans, the Dutch at Manhattan and Van Renssellær Island in the Hudson, the Swedes at Tinicum Island in the Delaware River a few miles below the mouth of the Schuylkill.725 St. Louis, located on a delta island of the Senegal River, is one of the oldest European towns in West Africa;726 and Bathurst, founded in 1618 on a similar site at the mouth of the Gambia, has for centuries now been the safe outlet for the trade of this stream.727 Such island settlements at river mouths are a phenomenon of the outer edge of every coastal region; but inland stations for trade or military control also seek the protection of an island site. The Russians in the seventeenth century secured their downstream conquest of the Amur by a succession of river island forts,728 which recall Colonel Byrd's early frontier post on an island in the Holston River, and George Rogers Clark's military stockade on Corn Island in the Ohio, which became the nucleus of the later city of Louisville.

More effective than rivers in the protection which they afford are swamps. Neither solid land nor navigable water, their sluggish, passive surface raises an obstacle of pure inertia to the movements of mankind. Hence they form one of those natural boundaries that segregate. In southern England, Ronmey Marsh, reinforced by the Wealden Forest, fixed the western boundary of the ancient Saxon kingdom of Kent by blocking expansion in that direction, just as the bordering swamps of the Lea and Colne rivers formed the eastern and western boundaries of Middlesex.729 The Fenland of the Wash, which extended in Saxon days from the highland about Lincoln south to Cambridge and Newmarket, served to hem in the Angles of Norfolk and Suffolk on the west, so that the occupation of the interior was left to later bands who entered by the estuaries of the Humber and Forth.730 In northern Germany, the low cross valleys of the Spree, Havel and Netze rivers, bordered by alder swamps, were long a serious obstacle to communication, and therefore became boundaries of districts,731 just as the Bourtanger Moor drew the dividing line between Holland and Hanover.

Swamp-bordered regions, as areas of natural isolation, guard and keep intact the people which they hold. Therefore they are regions of survival of race and language. The scattered islets of the Fens of England furnished an asylum to the early British Celts from Teutonic attacks,732 and later protected them against dominant infusion of Teutonic blood. Hence to-day in the Fenland and in the district just to the south we find a darker, shorter people than in the country to the east or west.733 Similarly the White Russians, occupying the poor, marshy region of uncertain watershed between the sources of the Duna, Dnieper and Volga, have the purest blood of all the eastern Slavs, though this distinction is coupled with poverty and retarded culture,734 a combination that anthropo-geography often reveals. Wholly distinct from the Russians and segregated from them by a barrier of swampy forests, we find the Letto-Lithuanians in the Baltic province of Courland, speaking the most primitive form of flectional languages classed as Aryan. The isolation which preserved their archaic speech, of all European tongues the nearest to the Sanskrit, made them the last European people to accept Christianity.735 The great race of the Slavic Wends, who once occupied all northern Germany between the Vistula and Elbe, has left only a small and declining remnant of its language in the swampy forests about the sources of the Spree.736 [See ethnographical map, p. 223.] The band of marshlands stretching through Holland from the shallow Zuyder Zee east to the German frontier, has given to Friesland and the coast islands of Holland a peculiar isolation, which has favored the development and survival of the peculiar Friesian dialect, that speech so nearly allied to Saxon English, and has preserved here the purest type of the tall, blond Teuton among the otherwise mixed stock of the Netherlands.737