But if Europe 'ends at the Pyrenees', it ends also anthropologically at
the Balkans, or even at the Carpathians; for the whole Balkan Peninsula,
and most of the highland core of peninsular Europe, is essentially
continuous with Asia Minor and the next eastward sections of the
Mountain Zone, so far as its human population is concerned, no less than
in its animals and plants. Biological continuity is as complete at the
Bosphorus as it is at Gibraltar. Here, what remains in dispute is not so
much whether 'Alpine' types are ultimately of Anatolian origin, as
whether their spread in Europe has been early or late, and whether their
predecessors here were predominantly 'Boreal' or 'Mediterranean'. It is
difficult, and perhaps needless, to decide whether lack of evidence or
political enthusiasm is more to blame for this; for the Roundheads of
prehistoric and of modern Europe are as contentious matter as their
English namesakes in the seventeenth century.

To this broadly threefold analysis of European man, add only this, that
ever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions and
left the grasslands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has
been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough
Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also there
has been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it will
be clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniform
basis of our European culture.

Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of
Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity
with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying
influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and
a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe'
amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in