Here survive an eighteenth century English, Christmas celebrated on Twelfth Night, the spinning wheel, and a belief in Joshua's power to arrest the course of the sun.[75] An easily accessible land is geographically hospitable to all new-comers, facilitates the mingling of peoples, the exchange of commodities and ideas.

The amalgamation of races in such regions depends upon the similarity or diversity of the ethnic elements and the duration of the common occupation.

The broad, open valley of the Danube from the Black Sea to Vienna contains a bizarre mixture of several stocks--Turks, Bulgarians, various families of pure Slavs, Roumanians, Hungarians, and Germans.

These elements are too diverse and their occupation of the valley too recent for amalgamation to have advanced very far as yet.

The maritime plain and open river valleys of northern France show a complete fusion of the native Celts with the Saxons, Franks, and Normans who have successively drifted into the region, just as the Teutonic and scanter Slav elements have blended in the Baltic plains from the Elbe to the Vistula.
[Sidenote: Change of habitat.] Here are four different classes of geographic influences, all which may become active in modifying a people when it changes its habitat.