territory of the other, while leaving a considerable margin for struggle on the debatable land between the two geographical regions. If it seems at the present day that the Nordic race has more than passed the Mediterranean in the race of life, we must remember that the fact that coal is chiefly found in the territory of the former, has given it an enormous economic advantage in recent times, an advantage which it may not be able to keep. The Alpine race presents a much more difficult problem. We have said nothing here of the so-called Aryan problem, because the whole conception of an Aryan race advancing from Asia with a ready-made culture, and imposing it upon a barbarian Europe, is somewhat out of date, and much that has been written on the subject of the Aryans preceded in time the disentanglement of the complex problems presented by European races. But with all deductions made, the incoming Asiatic race which we have called Alpine presents many curious problems. It seems probable that the languages of Europe are largely due to the grafting of Alpine or Eurasian tongues upon the different tongues already spoken by Mediterranean man. We have still in Britain a Celtic language, though it is spoken by people of Mediterranean characters, and it is an extraordinary fact that a people should impose its language and culture upon another race, and yet be itself unable to keep its footing among that race. It has been suggested that the new-comers, in Britain at least, were never more than an aristocracy, and that they disappeared by the mingling of their blood with the indigenous people, after having long dominated them. That is, it was as if we might suppose that the British population in India was cut off from the mother country, and ultimately disappeared owing to intermarriage, while their language and their customs remained in greatly modified form and replaced the existing languages and customs. The difficulties in regard to this hypothesis are twofold. In the first place, such a hypothesis of mingling seems inconsistent with the extraordinary persistency which this race has manifested in other parts of Europe, where it came into contact with the same races as in Britain; and, second, the position of the Alpine race in western Europe generally, its virtual limitation to relatively infertile land, seems inconsistent with the notion that it ever formed an aristocracy, apart from and above the other races. To-day in Germany it is so far from occupying the position of an aristocracy that it sometimes forms the lower classes to a Nordic dominant class, though the Alpine race is sometimes stated to be better adapted to town life than the Nordic.