34 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY vated northern strip lying between the mountains and the sea was to North Africa, such on the Continent of Europe was the strip lying also between the mountains and the sea which is known to us under the names of Italy, Spain, and Greece. To both these famous districts the Mediterranean had given life and the mountains defence. Beyond the mountains, equally on the north and on the south, countless hordes of nomads unacquainted with the gentler arts of civilisation, but vigorous and active in their barbarism, awaited nothing but the opportunity of conquest. The Scythians and the Berbers were, in their original condition, pastoral tribes of migratory habits, feeding exclusively on meat and milk, and clothing themselves in the skins of animals. Of many of them it is said that they had never even seen bread ; this, as well on the plains of Europe and Asia as in the African desert. They had no dwelling-houses and no domestic arts. Leather tents or straw huts served all their temporary purpose. But they were hardy, abstemious, expert riders, brave, brutal, and proficient in all the ruder military virtues. Nothing strikes the student of Berber history more than the resemblance to be noted between the characteristics of the Berber tribes and the descriptive traits recorded by Tacitus, and quoted by Gibbon from earlier authors, of the primitive inhabitants of Northern Europe. The cannibalism which distinguished the extreme barbarism of Africa was not wanting, as we know, among the aboriginals of Northern Germany. In Europe the decadence of Rome and the downfall of the Byzantine Empire gave opportunity for the northern tribes to possess themselves of all the outlying territories of the Empire, and from the forced wedlock of decadence and barbarism the states of modern Europe took their rise.

In Africa the strong intellectual impulse of the Jews and Saracens dominated the brute forces of barbarism by which it was surrounded, and the southern tribes, instead of conquering, became the instruments of conquest directed