It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Greece, and Italy to a less extent, were in climate and many other features bits of Asia Minor, almost shut off from northern Europe by the great Alpine barrier. The two regions were entered by different routes, each of which had left its mark on its travellers. Immigrants seeped into Italy and Greece through broken and rough mountain regions. Great invasions were difficult or impossible. They were sunny, smiling lands compared with the grim and dreary north. Men living in this milder climate did not need to be gross eaters. They lived from the fruits of their orchards to a far larger extent. Nuts were in early times almost a surrogate for grain. The olive furnished a delicious oil, and the grapes wine. The butter and cheese of northern Europe were neither needed nor desired.[143] Most of these habits, tastes, and desires had become fixed during the march through Asia Minor. The peoples which gradually went westward from the Iranian plateau through Asia Minor, across or around the Ægean Sea into Greece and Italy and Spain, generally found a very similar environment from beginning to end of their long journey. There was little in food, climate, or conditions to compel or stimulate change. Everything tended to more firmly fix in their structure the already long-inherited characters of their Iranian ancestors. These characteristics thus fixed have become stable and persistent, and have remained so in modern times in spite of repeated invasions and infusions of northern blood. We are perhaps justified in speaking of a Mediterranean race. It seems strange that Sergi should find traces of his Mediterranean race in Russia. Did these find their way so far northward directly from the Mediterranean area or are they merely sporadic groups more resistant to modifying influences; or are they perhaps groups which have separated from the westward migration at the Hellespont and turned northward? The Nordic peoples of Europe are perhaps after all not so far from their Mediterranean cousins. The Mediterranean race still holds its own around the Mediterranean. In France its blood is much mixed and greatly diluted with later infusions. In England it has generally been almost completely swamped by Aryan invasions.