The old long-headed stocks of the Steppe border in South Russia probably still form elements of the mixed Cossack populations, but the spreads of broad-heads both from the Carpathian forelands and from the Asiatic steppe have altered the average type a good deal. Asiatic broad-heads with the big cheek-bones and Tungus (often called Mongol) eyes have also long occupied the Arctic border of Russia, as Lapps, Samoyedes, &c., and, mixed with {15} Nordics, they form the Finn populations. Their features have at times been said to be distinguishable right down the east side of the Baltic into East Prussia in individuals here and there; one certainly finds them now and again in Gothlanders and even in Swedes. The net result is that the long-headed type is not a dominant element in Russia, save perhaps in parts of the one time Baltic provinces, that is in the new Baltic States. The line along which the hill masses of Central Europe grade down into the European plain that stretches from Ypres to the Urals is marked out in many ways in European life. Not far from it is the main line of European coalfields, a most momentous factor for modern times. It is a line of exchange towns of ancient renown. Near it is a belt of loess, that is of loose wind-blown material laid there in the interglacial phases of the Ice Age, so fine grained that it does not encourage and has never encouraged tree growth, though it is valuable for cultivation. The loess belt, because of its freedom from forest, was naturally of importance as a line of movement of early man as well as a line of early settlement, and it lay between the province of the long-heads (Nordics) and that of the broad-heads (Alpines). All along here are found and have long been found breeds originating from intimate inter-mixture of Nordic and Alpine stocks. The general fact seems to be that the head form is derived from the Alpine, and so is broad, but the colouring is more usually inherited from the other side, and so is generally fair. There are many varieties with distinctive facial and other features, but the broad fact is that the southern zone of the European plain, where the two stocks have had much fractionated contact (contacts of small groups) in little clearings of the forests that grew in Neolithic times, is a region of Alpine-Nordic stocks which have spread to Britain and through the Danube gaps towards the Balkans as well as in many other directions.