It cannot be too often repeated, moreover, that the little that is really illustrative in skeletal structure is a growth of the landscape and never a function of the blood. Elliot Smith in Egypt and von Luschen in Crete have examined an immense material yielded by graves ranging from the Stone Age to the present day. From the “Sea-peoples” of the middle of the second millennium B.C. to the Arabs and the Turks one human stream after another has passed over this region, but the average bone-structure has remained unaltered. It would be true, in a measure, to say that “race” has travelled as flesh over the fixed skeleton-form of the land.[177] The Alpine region to-day contains “peoples” of the most diverse origins--Teuton, Latin, Slav--and we need only glance backward to discover Etruscans and Huns there also. Tribe follows tribe. But the skeletal structure in the mankind of the region in general is ever the same, and only on the edges, towards the plains, does it gradually disappear in favour of other forms, which are themselves likewise fixed. As to race, therefore, and the race-wanderings of primitive men, the famous finds of prehistoric bones, Neanderthal to Aurignacian, prove nothing. Apart from some conclusions from the jaw-bone as to the kinds of food eaten, they merely indicate the basic land-form that is found there to this day. Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once in every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of the heavy hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from the South to the Rhine, and there it has certainly not visibly--i.e., botanically--changed. But in this instance “race” can be determined in other ways. There is a soil-born difference not merely between Southern and Northern, between Rhine and Moselle wines, but even between the products of every different site on every different hill-side; and the same holds good for every other high-grade vegetable “race,” such as tea and tobacco. Aroma, a genuine growth of the country-side, is one of the hall-marks (all the more significant because they cannot be measured) of true race. But noble races of men are differentiated in just the same intellectual way as noble wines. There is a like element, only sensible to the finest perceptions, a faint aroma in every form, that underneath all higher Culture connects the Etruscans and the Renaissance in Tuscany,[178] and the Sumerians, the Persians of 500 B.C., and the Persians of Islam on the Tigris.