ews in Palestine, traces of their pastoral
life in the grasslands of Mesopotamia could be discerned in their social
and political organization, in their ritual and literature. Survivals of
their nomadic life in Asiatic steppes still persist among the Turks of
Europe, after six centuries of sedentary life in the best agricultural
land of the Balkan Peninsula. One of these appears in their choice of
meat. They eat chiefly sheep and goats, beef very rarely, and swine not
at all.[29] The first two thrive on poor pastures and travel well, so
that they are admirably adapted to nomadic life in arid lands; the last
two, far less so, but on the other hand are the regular concomitant of
agricultural life. The Turk's taste to-day, therefore, is determined by
the flocks and herds which he once pastured on the Trans-Caspian plains.
The finished terrace agriculture and methods of irrigation, which the
Saracens had learned on the mountain sides of Yemen through a schooling
of a thousand years or more, facilitated their economic conquest of
Spain. Their intelligent exploitation of the country's resources for the
support of their growing numbers in the favorable climatic conditions
which Spain offered was a light-hearted task, because of the severe
training which they had had in their Arabian home.

The origin of Roman political institutions is intimately connected with
conditions of the naturally small territory where arose the greatness of
Rome. But now, after two thousand years we see the political impress of
this narrow origin spreading to the governments of an area of Europe
immeasurably larger than the region that gave it birth. In the United
States, little New England has been the source of the strongest
influences modifying the political, religious and cultural life of half
a continent; and as far as Texas and California these influences bear
the stamp of that narrow, unproductive environment which gave to its
sons energy of character and ideals.

[Sidenote: Transplanted religions.]

Ideas especially are light baggage, and travel with migrant peoples
over many a long and rough road. They are wafted like winged seed by the
wind, and strike root in regions where they could never have originated.
Few classes of ideas bear so plainly the geographic stamp of their
origin as religious ones, yet none have spread more widely. The abstract
monotheism sprung from the bare grasslands of western Asia made slow but
final headway against th