Upper and Lower Austria, the Tyrol and Styria have a very considerable Nordic element which is in political control but the Alpine races are slowly replacing the Nordics both there and in Hungary.
Holland and Flanders are purely Teutonic, the Flemings being the descendants of those Franks who did not adopt Latin speech as did their Teutonic kin across the border in Artois and Picardy; and Holland is the ancient Batavia with the Frisian coast lands eastward to old Saxony.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden are purely Nordic and yearly contribute swarms of a splendid type of immigrants to America and are now, as they have been for thousands of years, the chief nursery and broodland of the master race.
In southwestern Norway and in Denmark, there is a substantial number of short, dark round heads of Alpine affinities. These dark Norwegians are regarded as somewhat inferior socially by their Nordic countrymen. Perhaps as a result of this disability, a disproportionately large number of Norwegian immigrants to America are of this type. Apparently America is doomed to receive in these later days the least desirable classes and types from each European nation now exporting men.
In mediæval times the Norse and Danish Vikings sailed not only the waters of the known Atlantic, but ventured westward through the fogs and frozen seas to Iceland, Greenland and America.
Sweden, after sending forth her Goths and other early Teutonic tribes, turned her attention to the shores of the eastern Baltic, colonized the coast of Finland and the Baltic provinces and supplied also a strong Scandinavian element to the aristocracy of Russia.
The coast of Finland is as a result Swedish and the natives of the interior have distinctly Nordic characters with the exception of the skull, which in its roundness shows an Alpine cross.
The population of the so-called Baltic provinces of Russia is everywhere Nordic and their affinities are with Scandinavia and Germany rather than with Slavic Moscovy. The most primitive Aryan languages, namely, Lettish, Lithuanian and the recently extinct Old Prussian, are found in this neighborhood and here we are not far from the original Nordic homeland.
IX
THE NORDIC FATHERLAND
The area in Europe where the Nordic race developed and in which the Aryan languages originated probably included the forest region of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia, together with the grasslands which stretched from the Ukraine eastward into the steppes south of the Ural. From causes already mentioned this area was long isolated from the rest of the world and especially from Asia. When the unity of the Aryan race and of the Aryan language was broken up at the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, wave after wave of the early Nordics pushed westward along the sandy plains of the north and pressed against and through the Alpine populations of central Europe. Usually these early Nordics, as indeed many of the later ones, constituted only a thin layer of ruling classes and there must have been many countries conquered by them in which we have no historic evidence of their existence, linguistic or otherwise. This must have certainly been the case in those numerous instances where only the leaders were Nordics and the great mass of their followers slaves or serfs of inferior races.