and commercial Hollander, when transplanted to the dry
grasslands of South Africa, became pastoral like the native Kaffirs. The
French voyageur of Canada could scarcely be distinguished from the
Indian trapper; occupation, food, dress, and spouse were the same. Only
a lighter tint of skin distinguished the half-breed children of the
Frenchman. The settlers of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths, at
least for a generation or two, showed little outward difference in mode
of life from that of the savage community among which they dwelt.[242]

[Sidenote: Vicinal groups of similar or diverse race and culture.]

The more alike the components of such a vicinal group of people, the
easier, freer and more effective will be the mediating function of the
central one. Germany has demonstrated this in her long history as
intermediary between the nations of southeastern and western Europe. The
people of Poland, occupying a portion of the Baltic slope of northern
Europe, fended by no natural barriers from their eastern and western
neighbors, long constituted a transition form between the two. Though
affiliated with Russia in point of language, the Poles are Occidental in
their religion; and their head-form resembles that of northern Germany
rather than that of Russia.[243] The country belongs to western Europe in
the density of its population (74 to the square kilometer or 190 to the
square mile), which is quadruple that of remaining European Russia, and
also in its industrial and social development. The partition of Poland
among the three neighboring powers was the final expression of its
intermediate location and character.[244] One part was joined politically
to the Slav-German western border of Russia, and another to the
German-Slav border of Germany, while the portion that fell to the
Austrian Empire simply extended the northern Slav area of that country
found in Bohemia, Moravia, and the Slovak border of Hungary. [Map page
223.]

If the intermediate people greatly differs in race or civilization from
both neighbors, it exercises and receives slight influence. The Mongols
of Central Asia, between China on one side and Persia and India on the
other, have been poor vehicles for the exchange of culture between these
two great districts. The Hungarians, located between the Roumanians and
Germans on the east and west, Slovaks and Croatians on the north and
south, have helped little to reconcile race differences in the great
empi