From The Contemporary Review.

a part, and indeed a great part, of history;

THE MIGRATIONS OF THE RACES OF MEN they create nations and build up states;

CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY..

BY JAMES BRYCE.

they determine the extension of languages and laws; they bring wealth to some regions and leave others neglected; they mark out the routes of commerce and affect the economic relations of different countries.

No line of historical inquiry sets before us more clearly at every stage the connection between man as an associative being

THERE are two senses in which we may claim for geography that it is a meetingpoint of the sciences. All the departments of research which deal with external nature touch one another in and through it-geology, botany, zoology, meteorology, as well as, though less directly, the various branches of physics. There is toiling, trading, warring, ruling, legisno one of these whose data are not, to lating and that physical environment a greater or less extent, also within the whose influence over his development is province of geography; none whose con- none the less potent and constant because clusions have not a material bearing on he has learnt in obeying it to rule it and geographical problems. And geography to make it yield to him constantly increasis also the point of contact between the ing benefits. The topic is so large and sciences of nature, taken all together, branches off into so many other cognate and the branches of inquiry which deal inquiries, that you will not expect me, with man and his institutions. Geography within the narrow limits of an address, to gathers up, so to speak, the results which do more than draw its outlines, enumerate the geologist, the botanist, the zoologist, the principal causes whose action it sets and the meteorologist have obtained, and before us, touch upon its history, and presents them to the student of history, refer to a few out of the many problems of economics, of politics we might, per- its consideration raises. The migrations haps, add of law, of philology, and of of peoples have been among the most architecture as an important part of the potent factors in making the world of data from which he must start, and of the to-day different from the world of thirty materials to which he will have to refer centuries ago. If they continue they will at many points in the progress of his be scarcely less potent in their influence researches. It is with this second point on the future of the race; if they cease, of contact, this aspect of geography as that cessation will itself be a fact of the the basis for history, that we are to oc- highest economic and social significance. cupy ourselves to-night. Understanding that the Scottish Geographical Society desires to bring into prominence what may be called the human side of the science, and to inculcate its significance for those who devote themselves to the presently urgent problems of civilized society, I have chosen, as not unsuitable to an inaugural address, a subject which belongs almost equally to physical and descriptive geology on the one side, to history and economics on the other. The movements of the races and tribes of mankind over the surface of our planet are in the first instance determined mainly by the physical conditions of its surface and its atmosphere; but they become themselves

• An inaugural address delivered at the first meeting of the London branch of the Scottish Geographical Society.

At the outset it is convenient to distinguish the different forms which movements of population have taken. These forms may be grouped under three heads, which I propose to call by the names of transference, dispersion, and permeation names which need a few words of illustration.

By transference I mean that form of migration in which the whole, or a large majority of a race or tribe quits its ancient seats in a body and moves into some other region. Such migrations seldom occur except in the case of nomad peoples who are little attached to any particular piece of soil; but we may almost class among the nomads tribes who, like our own remote Teutonic ancestors, although they cultivate the soil, put no capital into it in the way of permanent improvements, and

migrating population becomes fused with that which it finds, depends chiefly on the difference between the level of civilization of the two races. Between the English settlers in North America and the

build no dwellings of brick or stone. The prehistoric migrations usually belonged to this form, and so did that great series of movements which brought the northern races into the Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries of our era. In mod-native Indians there has been hardly any ern times we find few instances, because mixture of blood; between the French in such nomad races as remain are now shut Canada and the Indians there was a little up within narrow limits by the settled more; between the Spaniards and the less states that surround them, which have barbarous inhabitants of Mexico there has possessed, since the invention of gun- been so much that the present Mexican powder and of standing armies, enor- nation is a mixed one, the native blood mously superior defensive strength. We doubtless predominating. Something, should, however, have had an interesting however, also depends on the relative case to point to had the Dutch, when pressed by the power of Philip II., embraced the offer that came to them from England to migrate in a body and establish themselves, their dairying, their flax culture, and their linen manufacture in the rich pastures and humid air of Ireland. Under the head of migrations by dis-told-who, without any political organpersion, I include those cases in which a ization, have by virtue of their religion tribe or race, while retaining its ancient preserved their identity for more than a seats, overflows into new lands, whether vacant or already occupied; in the latter event sometimes ejecting the original inhabitants, sometimes fusing with them, sometimes dwelling among them, but remaining distinct.

numbers of the two races; and sometimes religion keeps a dispersed people from commingling with those among whom it dwells, as has happened in the case of the Jews, the Armenians, and the stance of an extremely small nation - for Parsees. These last are a remarkable inthere are not eighty thousand of them all

thousand years. Dispersion has been the most widely operative form of migration in modern times, owing to those improvements in navigation which have enabled remote parts of our large world, separated by broad and stormy seas, to be colonized more easily than in the tiny world of ancient or mediæval times was possible even by land.

Examples are furnished by the case of the Norsemen, who found Iceland prac tically vacant, while in England they became easily, in Ireland and Gaul more The third form, which we may call slowly, mingled with the previous inhabi- permeation or assimilation, is not in tants. When our own ancestors came from strictness a form of migration at all, bethe Frisian coast they slew or drove out cause it may exist where the number of the bulk of the Celtic population; when persons changing their dwelling-place is the Franks entered Gaul they became extremely small; but it deserves to be commingled with it. It is by such a proc- reckoned with the other two forms because ess of dispersion that the British race it produces effects closely resembling has spread itself out over North America theirs in altering the character of a popuand Australasia. In much smaller num-lation. I use the term permeation to cover bers, the Spaniards diffused themselves those instances, both numerous and imporover southern North America, and the tant, in which one race or nation so spreads northern and western parts of South over another race or nation its language, America; and by a similar process the its literature, its religion, its institutions, Russians have for two centuries been very its customs, or some one or more of these slowly filling the better parts of Siberia. sources of influence, as to impart its own Whether in each case of dispersion the character to the nation so influenced, and thus to supersede the original type by its Own. In such a process the infusion of new blood from the stronger people to the

In 1771 a great Kalmuk horde moved en masse from the steppes of the Caspian to the frontiers of China, losing more than half its numbers on the way. .

timacy between them. The instances just mentioned show in what different ways and varying degrees assimilation may take place. In some of them the assimilated race still retains a distinct national character. The Moor of Morocco, for instance, differs from the Arab much as the Greek-speaking Syrian and the Latinspeaking Lusitanian differed from a Greek of Attica or a Roman of Latium. But the Finnish tribes of northern and eastern

vasses, and Mordvins, who have been gradually Russified during the last two centuries, are on their way to become practically undistinguishable from the true Slavonic Russians of Kieff. And to come nearer home, the Celts of Cornwall have been Anglified, and those of the Highlands of Scotland have in many districts become assimilated to the Lowland Scotch, with no great intermixture of blood.

weaker may be comparatively slight, yet | native races, possibly with little social inif sufficient time be allowed, the process may end by a virtual identification of the two. Of course, when there is much intermarriage, not only does the change proceed faster, but it tells on the permeating as well as on the permeated race. The earliest instance of this diffusion of a civilization with little immixture of blood is to be found in the action of the Greek language, ideas, and manners upon the countries round the eastern half of the Mediterranean, and particularly upon Russia, Voguls, Tcheremisses, TchuAsia Minor. The native languages to some extent held their ground for a while in the wilder parts of the interior, but the upper classes and the whole type of culture became everywhere Hellenic. In the same way the Romans Romanized Gaul and Spain and North Africa. In the same way the Arabs in the centuries immediately after Mohammed Arabized not only Egypt and Syria, but the whole of North Africa, down to and including the maritime parts of Morocco, and have in later times, though to a far smaller extent, established the influence of their language and religion on the coasts of East Africa and in parts of the East Indian Archipelago. There is reason to believe, though our data are scanty, that in a somewhat similar way the Aryan tribes, who entered India at a very remote time, diffused their language, religion, and customs over northern Hindustan as far as the Bay of Bengal, changing to some extent the dark races whom they found in possession of the country, but being also so commingled with those more numerous races as to lose much of their own character. Hinduism and languages derived from Sanskrit came to prevail from the Indus to the Brahmaputra, although it would seem that to the east of the Jumna the proportion of Aryan intruders was very small. We ourselves in India are giving to the educated and wealthier class so much that is English in the way of ideas and literature that if the process continues for another century, our tongue may have become the lingua franca of India, and our type of civilization have extinguished all others. Yet if this happens it will happen with no mixture of blood between the European and the

It is worth while to be exact in distinguishing this process of permeation from cases of dispersion, because the two often go together that is to say, the migration of a certain, though perhaps a small number of persons of a vigorous and masterful race into a territory inhabited by another race of less force, or perhaps on a lower level of culture, is apt to be followed by a predominance of the stronger type, or at any rate by such a change in the character of the whole population as leads men in later times to assume that the number of migrating persons must have been large. The cases of the Greeks in western Asia and the Spaniards in the New World are in point. We talk of Asia Minor as if it had become a Greek country under Alexander's successors, of Mexico and Peru as Spanish countries after the sixteenth century, yet in both instances the native population must have largely preponderated. If therefore we were to look only at the changes which the speech, the customs, the ideas and institutions of nations have undergone, we might be disposed to attribute too much to the mere movement of races, too little to the influences which force of character, fertility of intellect, and command of scientific resource have exercised, and are still exercising, as the lead

ing races become more and more the owners and rulers of the backward regions of the world.

II. We may now proceed to inquire what have been the main causes to which an outflow or an overflow of population from one region to another is due. Omitting, for the present, the cases of smaH colonies founded for special purposes, these causes may be reduced to three. They are food, war, and labor. These three correspond in a sort of rough way to three stages in the progress of mankind, the first belonging especially to his savage and semi-civilized conditions, the second to that in which he organizes himself in political communities and uses his organization to prey upon or reduce to servitude his weaker neighbor; the third to that wherein industry and commerce have become the ruling factors in his society and wealth the main object of his efforts. The correspondence, however, is far from exact, because the need of subsistence remains through the combative and the industrial periods a potent cause of migration, while the love of war and plunder, active even among savages, is by no means extinct in the mature civilization of to-day.

gates of the empire, found those gates undefended, entered the tempting countries that lay towards the Mediterranean and the ocean, and drew others on to follow. Of modern instances the most remarkable is the stream of emigration which began to swell out of Ireland after the great famine of 1846-7, and which has not yet ceased to flow.

Among civilized peoples the same force is felt in a slightly different form. As population increases the competition for the means of livelihood becomes more intense, while at the same time the standard of comfort tends to rise. Hence those on whom the pressure falls heaviest (if they are not too shiftless to move), and those who have the keenest wish to better their condition, forsake their homes for lands that lie under another sun. It is thus that the Russian peasantry have been steadily moving from the north to the south of European Russia, till they have now occupied the soil down to the very foot of Caucasus for some five hundred miles from the point they had reached a century and a half ago. It is thus that, on a smaller scale, the Greek-speaking population of the west coast of Asia Minor is creeping eastward up the river valleys, and beginning to re-colonize the interior of that once prosperous region. It is thus that North America and Australasia have been filled by the overflow of Europe during the last sixty years, for before that time the growth of the United States and of Canada had been mainly a home growth from the small seeds planted two hun

In speaking of food, or rather the want of food, as a cause, we must include several sets of cases. One is that in which sheer hunger, due perhaps to a drought or a hard winter, drives a tribe to move to some new region where the beasts of chase are more numerous, or the pastures are not exhausted, or a more copious rainfall favors agriculture.* Another is that of a tribe increasing so fast that the pre-dred years earlier. That the mere spirit existing means of subsistence no longer suffice for its wants. And a third is that where, whether or not famine be present to spur its action, a people conceives the desire for life in a richer soil or a more genial climate. To one or other of these cases we may refer nearly all the movements of populations in primitive times, the best known of which are those which brought the Teutonic and Slavonic tribes into the Roman Empire. They had a hard life in northern and eastern Europe; their natural growth exceeded the resources which their pastoral or village area sup. plied, and when once one or two had begun to press upon their neighbors, the disturbance was felt by each in succession until some, pushed up against the very

A succession of dry seasons, which may merely diminish the harvest of those who inhabit tolerably humid regions, will produce such a famine in the inner parts of a continent like Asia as to force the people to seek some better dwelling-place.

of enterprise, apart from the increase of population, counts for little as a cause of migration, seems to be shown not only by the slight outflow from Europe during last century, but by the fact that France, where the population is practically stationary, sends out no emigrants save a few to Algeria, while the steady movement from Norway and Sweden does little more than relieve the natural growth of the population of those countries. As regards European emigration to America, it is worth noting that during the last thirty years it has been steadily extending, not only eastwards towards the inland parts of Europe, but also downwards in the scale of civilization, tapping, so to speak, lower and lower strata. Between 1840 and 1850 the flow towards America was chiefly from the British Isles. From 1849 onwards, it began to be considerable from Germany also, and very shortly afterwards from Scandinavia, reaching a figure of hundreds