The reasons for this are doubtless numerous, but among them one may note that the spread from the Aegean could hardly be into regions just being opened up for agricultural settlement, and that the Latin spread was associated with the spread of a great scheme of communications and of legal organization. Again, one should realize the localism which was so deep-seated in Greek feeling, and contrast it with the famous idea of 'Civis Romanus'. In accord with this we naturally find that the Eastern Church translated the sacred books into the Slav languages, whereas the Western Church has insisted on Latin in a way that has been full of the most momentous consequences for modern Europe. We must also remember the progressive hemming in of the Greek region by Islam at the time when languages were growing out of {22} Latin in the west, so that the Greek base had nothing like the expansive power of the Latin one. Facts of physical geography had a good deal to do with the rise of the Romance languages from Latin. The Empire reached to the Danube and Rhine and over the English plain. It had some hold over Wales, and for a time over South Scotland, but none over the regions where Celtic has persisted in Gaelic form. It is abundantly proved that the hold of Rome over Britain was less close than that over Gaul, where much Romanization of the leader classes occurred, and the Romanized urban life was fixed for all later time in the south. Fragments of evidence from Silchester and elsewhere go to show that Latin was widely used in urban life, and so its vocabulary penetrated the language of the pagani or peasantry, and Welsh to this day retains many traces of this contact with Latin. But a country with marked contrast of speech between peasant and citizen is linguistically weak, and the Anglo-Saxons were thus helped to spread their language when they arrived after the Romans lost their grip and many Romano-British leaders had emigrated to Brittany. Romance languages do not now reach the banks of the Rhine anywhere, though they approach them fairly closely at the gate of Belfort, that approach to the Rhine where southern influences would spread most powerfully. Wallony, as a dissected plateau, rather remote and backward until the coal period, has retained its Romance speech, and has increasingly assimilated it to modern French. Lorraine, separated from the Rhine basin by the forested heights of Hunsrück and Hardt, has also remained stubbornly French, but German has spread up the Rhine tributaries through North Switzerland, up the Ill basin, which is now Alsace, up the Moselle gorge between Hunsrück and Eifel, so that Trier (Augusta Trevirorum, Treves) is now German, up the tributaries of the lower Moselle, so that the peasantry of Luxembourg, the people of the Eifel and of the Saar basin, are largely or even mainly {23} German speaking, and along the lowland to Flanders, which maintains Low German dialects, collectively called Flemish. The