sway. In 271 they were
located on the middle Danube, and sixty years afterwards in Moravia.
Later they settled for seventy years in Pannonia within the Empire,
where they assimilated Roman civilization and adopted the Arian form of
Christianity from their Gothic neighbors.[150] In Spain, as we have seen,
they occupied Galicia and Andalusia for a time before passing over into
Africa in 429. Here was a migration lasting two centuries and a half,
reaching from the Baltic to the southern shores of the Mediterranean,
starting on the bleak sterile plains of the north amid barbarous
neighbors, ending in the sunny grain fields and rich cities of Roman
Africa. The picture which we get of the victorious Vandals parceling out
the estates of Roman nobles, and, from the standpoint of their more
liberal faith, profiting by the dissensions of the two Catholic sects of
Africa, shows us a people greatly modified by their long sweep through
the civilized outskirts of the Empire. So it was with the Lombards and
Goths who invaded Italy.

Among primitive tribes, who move in smaller groups and must conform
closely to the dictates of their environment, the modifying effects of
people and land through which they pass are conspicuous. Ratzel
describes the gradual withdrawal of a Hottentot people from western Cape
Colony far into the arid interior before the advance of Kaffirs and
Europeans by saying: "The stock and name of the Namaquas wandered
northward, acquiring new elements, and in course of time filling the old
mold with new contents."[151] This is the typical result of such
primitive movements. The migration of the Delaware Indians from an early
home somewhere northwest of the Great Lakes to their historical habitat
between the Hudson and Potomac Rivers was a slow progress, which
somewhere brought them into contact with maize-growing tribes, and gave
them their start in agriculture.[152] The transit lands through which
these great race journeys pass exercise a modifying effect chiefly
through their culture and their peoples, less through their physical
features and climate. For that the stay of the visitants is generally
too brief.

[Sidenote: Effect of early maritime migration.]

Even early maritime migrants did not keep their strains pure. The
untried navigator sailing from island to headland, hugging the coast and
putting ashore for water, came into contact with the natives. Cross
currents of migration can be traced in Polynesian wa