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.