These races show other physical characters which are definite but difficult to describe, such as texture of skin and cast of features, especially of the nose. The contrast of mental and spiritual endowments is equally definite, but even more elusive of definition. It is with the action and interaction of these three groups, together with internal civil wars, that recorded history deals. While, so far as we know, these three races have occupied their present relative positions from the beginning, there have been profound changes in their distribution. The two essential phenomena, however, are, first, the retreat of the Nordic race westward from the Grasslands of western Asia and eastern Europe to the borders of the Atlantic, until it occupies a relatively small area on the periphery of Eurasia. The second phenomenon is of equal importance, namely, the more or less thorough Nordicizing of the westernmost extensions of the other two races, namely, the Mediterranean on the north coast of the Inland Sea, who have been completely Aryanized in speech, and have been again and again saturated with Nordic blood, and the even more profound Nordicization in speech and in blood of the short, dark, round-skulled inhabitants of central Europe, from Brittany through central France, southern Germany, and northern Italy into Austrian and Balkan lands. So thorough has been this process that the western Alpines have at the present time no separate race consciousness and are to be considered as wholly European. As to the Alpines of eastern and central Europe, the Slavs, the case is somewhat different. East of a line drawn from the Adriatic to the Baltic the Nordicizing process has been far less perfect, although nearly complete as to speech, since all the Slavic languages are Aryan. Throughout these Slavic lands, great accessions of pure Mongoloid blood have been introduced within relatively recent centuries. East of this belt of imperfectly Nordicized Alpines we reach the Asiatic Alpines, as yet entirely untouched by western blood or culture. These groups merge into the Mongoloids of eastern Asia. So we find, thrust westward from the Heartland, a race touching the Atlantic at Brittany, thoroughly Asiatic and Mongoloid in the east, very imperfectly Nordicized in the centre, and thoroughly Nordicized culturally in the far west of Europe, where it has become, and must be accepted as, an integral part of the White World. As to the great Nordic race, within relatively recent historic times it occupied the Grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas eastward to the Himalayas. Traces of Nordic peoples in central Asia are constantly found, and when archæological research there becomes as intensive as in Europe we shall be astonished to find how long, complete, and extended was their occupation of western Asia.