make their
civilization, if not their race, permeate the acquired territory, and
gradually impose on it their language and economic methods. The Poles,
who once boasted a large and distinguished nationality, are being
Germanized and Russified to their final national extinction. The Finns,
whose Scandinavian offshoot has been almost absorbed in Sweden,[232] are
being forcibly dissolved in the Muscovite dominion by powerful reaegents,
by Russian schoolmasters, a Russian priesthood, Russian military
service.

[Sidenote: No new ethnic types.]

No new types of races have been developed either by amalgamation or by
transfer to new climatic and economic conditions in historic times.
Contrasted geographic conditions long ago lost their power to work
radical physical changes in the race type, because man even with the
beginnings of civilization learned to protect himself against extremes
of climate. He therefore preserved his race type, which consequently in
the course of ages lost much of its plasticity and therewith its
capacity to evolve new varieties.[233] Where ethnic amalgamations on a
large scale have occurred as a result of the historical movement, as in
Mexico, the Sudan and Central Africa, the local race, being numerically
stronger than the intruders and better adapted to the environment, has
succeeded in maintaining its type, though slightly modified, side by
side with the intruders. The great historical movements of modern times,
however, have been the expansion of European peoples over the retarded
regions of the world. These peoples, coming into contact with inferior
races, and armed generally with a race pride which was antagonistic to
hybrid marriages, preserved their blood from extensive intermixture.
Hybridism, where it existed, was an ephemeral feature restricted to
pioneer days, when white women were scarce, or to regions of extreme
heat or cold, where white women and children could with difficulty
survive. Even in Spanish America, where ethnic blendings were most
extensive, something of the old Spanish pride of race has reasserted
itself.

[Sidenote: Checks to differentiation.]

Improved communication maintains or increases the ranks of the intruders
from the home supply. The negroes in North America, imported as they
were _en masse_, then steadily recruited by two centuries of the slave
trade, while their race integrity was somewhat protected by social
ostracism, have not been seriously modified physi