In the exceedingly complex, subdivided, and romantic mountain districts of the globe, the races have attained, by virtue of the variety of their resources and the energy of their stock, to the highest results of civilization, and have manifested the most independent and progressive spirit. In such regions, hunting, working in wood, the settled life of shepherds, working in metals, agriculture on such terrace lands as those of Nepaul, Cashmere, Palestine, the Lebanon, Apennine, and other ranges, fruit culture, tilling vineyards, the cultivation of all kinds of industry, as in Central Germany and in most regions of the temperate zone, develop most thoroughly and speedily the culture of a people. In such occupations men learn to lean more on each other, and grow into that diversity of occupation and division of labor, which are the latest results of civilization. The Zend, the Sanscrit, and the Persian nations which people the fertile tracts at the base of the Himalaya Mountains, from Maghada, Lahore, Nepaul, and Cashmere, as far as Persepolis and Hamadan, Susa and Shiraz, the inhabitants of the hill country of Palestine and Syria, those of the Tehama range of mountains in Arabia, those in the moderately elevated meadows of Gondar, as well as those in all the European Alpine lands, Switzerland, Tyrol, Styria, as well as the inhabitants of the mountain region of Peru and Mexico, all attain to an early and considerably advanced state of civilization. Other nations have found in mountains asylums in time of danger—the Tsherkeses and Ossetes among the Caucasus, for instance, the Basques among the Pyrenees, and the Gorals among the Carpathians. The lowlands, as soon as the water had left them enough to make them habitable, have become, from the first, the abodes of a teeming population; and there has been the same blending of races in the most ancient as in the most recently settled, in China as in Texas, and, in truth, all North America. Often these inroads of population have been a source of injury, as has been the case in the northern Siberian plains, where the Finnish tribes have made their homes, and in the waste of Sahara, where the Barbary tribes, the Bedouins, the Tibboos, and the Tuaricks have made their retreat.