In dealing with the varied influences which engage attention in a study of linguistic areas the student is frequently compelled to pause before the importance of economic relations. Inspection of a map of Europe suggests strikingly that zones of linguistic contact were destined by their very location to become meeting-places for men speaking different languages. They correspond to the areas of circulation defined by Ratzel.[268] The confusion of languages on their site is in almost every instance the result of human intercourse determined by economic causes. Necessity, far more than the thought of lucre, compels men to resort to intercourse with strangers. In Belgium, after the Norman conquest, the burghers of Flanders were able to draw on English markets for the wool which they converted into the cloth that gave their country fame in the fairs of Picardy and Champagne.[269] We have here a typical example of Ratzel’s “Stapelländern” or “transit regions.” In very small localities the spread of language brought about by economic changes has occasionally come under the scrutiny of modern observers. At Grimault, in the ancient land of Burgundy, the deterioration of the local patois due to intensive working of quarries between 1860 and 1880 has been studied by E. Blin.[270] Laborers from remote districts were attracted by the prospect of work. Some intermarried with the natives. The influx of the foreign element was followed by the replacement of the locality’s vernacular by French. In west-central Europe the line of traffic along the Rhine at the end of the twelfth century ran from Cologne to Bruges along the divide between French and Flemish. Lorraine, a region of depression between the Archean piles of the Ardennes and Vosges, invited access from east and west and was known to historians as a Gallo-Romanic market place of considerable importance.[271] In our time the river trade between Holland and Germany along the Rhine has caused expansion of Dutch into German territory as far as Wesel and Crefeld. The intruding language, however, yields to German wherever the latter is present.[272] Prevalence of French in parts of Switzerland is generally ascribed to travel through certain Alpine passes.[273] The area of human circulation between Lake Constance and Lake Geneva has endowed Switzerland with 35 different dialects of German, 16 of French, 8 of Italian and 5 of Romansh.[274] The penetration of German into the Trentino has already been explained. In Austria the entire valley of the Danube has provided continental trade with one of its most important avenues. Attention is called elsewhere to the Balkan peninsula as an intercontinental highway. In a word, language always followed in the wake of trade and Babel-like confusion prevailed along channels wherein men and their marketable commodities flowed.