Here is a region which stands in free communication with the agricultural population of the parkland zone, open to influences from the steppe, accepting the higher civilization of Phrygia and the Ægean. It is a people of advanced agriculture, hence probably of rapidly increasing population, open to trade and commerce. Here wide and free communications would be likely to prevent the formation of an unyielding cake or crust of custom. People meeting from all lands and cultures might well make and use a language capable of expressing a great variety of shades of thought peculiar to a variety of peoples and cultures; we might safely call it a mixed language springing from a mixture of peoples. Here, as in the Ægean region, the more or less fortified town or village would be a necessity. Here the horse and wagon would be early introduced from the east. Here the patriarchate, so characteristic of nomadic tribes, would be early imported from the steppe, or may have been developed independently. There is a universality in the Indo-European religion, a sanity and proportion in their whole mode of thought, a broad sympathy, a willingness to accept new ideas and conditions--in general, a breadth of mind which could hardly be the product of isolation but rather of men who had "seen the customs of many men and many cities," and could look with tolerance and charity on alien cultures and fully appreciate their worth and advantages. Our Teutonic ancestors carried their mental and cultural environment with them wherever they went. They were apostles of purity of blood and hence of isolation. They were never good mixers, as were Celt and Achæan. All three migrated and conquered far and wide, and both usually disappeared in the alien population. But the Teuton left little impression on the alien culture, while Achæan and Celt leavened the whole mass. Here, as in other respects, Celt and Teuton show an incompatibility and oppositeness which strongly suggest difference of origin. But we must carefully avoid too great certainty and definiteness of assertion. The weight of probability seems to be against any theory which locates the first, original homeland in the far east or in the far northwest. But we deal only with probabilities, and may well "carry our theories on our finger-tips." If the cradle was somewhere in southern Russia north of the Black Sea, or somewhat farther east or west, its second homeland just before the great dispersal was vastly larger. Myres thinks that it extended far to the eastward of the Volga, which perhaps was the boundary between the eastern and western branches, and whose upper waters drained a very early home of the Finns.