[Sidenote: Boatmen tribes or castes.]

In undeveloped countries, where rivers are the chief highways, we occasionally see the survival of a distinct race of boatmen amid an intruding people of different stock, preserved in their purity by their peculiar occupation, which has given them the aloofness of a caste. In the Kwang-tung province of southern China are 40,000 Tanka boat people, who live in boats and pile-dwellings in the Canton River. The Chinese, from whom they are quite distinct, regard them as a remnant of the original population, which was dislodged by their invasion and forced to take refuge on the water. They gradually established intercourse with the conquerors of the land, but held themselves aloof. They marry only among themselves, have their own customs, and enjoy a practical monopoly of carrying passengers and messages between the steamers and the shore at Macao, Hongkong and Canton.[711] In the same way, the middle Niger above Gao possesses a distinct aquatic people, the Somnos or Bosos, who earn their living as fishermen and boatmen on the river. They spread their villages along the Niger and its tributaries, and occupy separate quarters in the large towns like Gao and Timbuctoo. They are creatures of the river rather than of the land, and show great skill and endurance in paddling and poling their narrow dugouts on their long Niger voyages.[712]

Reference has been made before to the large river population of China who live on boats and rafts, and forward the trade of the vast inland waterways. These are people, differentiated not in race, but in occupation and mode of life, constantly recruited from the congested population of the land. Allied to them are the trackers or towing crews whose villages form a distinctive feature of the turbulent upper Yangtze, and who are employed, sometimes three hundred at a time, to drag junks up the succession of rapids above Ichang.[713] Similarly the complex of navigable waterways centering about Paris, as far back as the reign of Tiberius Caesar, gave rise to the Nautae Parisii or guild of mariners, from whom the city of Paris derived its present coat of arms—a vessel under full sail. These Lutetian boatmen handled the river traffic in all the territory drained by the Seine, Marne, and Oise. Later, in the reign of Louis the Fat, they were succeeded by the Mercatores aquae Parisiaci, and from them sprang the municipal body appointed to regulate the river navigation and commerce.[714]

[Sidenote: River islands as protected sites.]

The location of the ancient tribe of the Parisii is typical of many other weak riverine folk who seek in the islands of a river a protected position to compensate for their paucity of number. The Parisii, one of the smallest of the Gallic tribes, ill-matched against their populous neighbors, took refuge on ten islands and sandbars of the Seine and there established themselves.[715] Stanley found an island in the Congo near the second cataract of Stanley Falls occupied by five villages of the Baswa, who had taken refuge there from the attacks of the bloodthirsty Bakuma.[716] During the Tartar invasions of Russia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bands of refugees from the surrounding country gathered for mutual defense on the islands of the Dnieper River, and became the nucleus of the Dnieper Cossacks.[717] The Huron tribe of American Indians, reduced to a mere fragment by repeated Iroquois attacks, fled first to the islands of St. Joseph and Michilimackinac in Lake Huron, and in 1856 to the Isle of Orleans in the St. Lawrence. But even this location under the guns of their French allies in Quebec failed to protect them, for the St. Lawrence was a highway for the war fleets of their implacable foe.[718]

[Sidenote: River and lake islands as robber strongholds.]

A river island not only confers the negative benefit of protection, but affords a coign of vantage for raids on the surrounding country, being to some extent proof against punitive attacks. It offers special facilities for depredations on parties crossing the river; here the divided current, losing something of its force, is less of an obstacle, and the island serves as a resting place on the passage. Immunity from punishment breeds lawlessness. The Ba Toka who, fifty years ago, inhabited the islands in the great southern bend of the Zambesi, utilized their location to lure wandering tribes on to their islands, under the pretext of ferrying them across, and then to rob them, till Sebituane, the great Makololo chief, cleaned out their fastnesses and opened the river for trade.[719] The islands in the wide stretches of the Lualaba River in the Babemba country were described to Livingstone as harboring a population of marauders and robbers, who felt themselves safe from attack.[720] The same unenviable reputation attaches to the Budumas of the Lake Chad islands. A weak, timid, displaced people, they nevertheless lose no chance of raiding the herds of the Sudanese tribes inhabiting the shores of the Lake, and carrying off the stolen cattle on their wretched rafts to their island retreats.[721]

[Sidenote: River peninsulas as protected sites.]

The protection of an island location is almost equalled in the peninsulas formed by the serpentines or meanders of a river. Hence these are choice sites for fortress or settlement in primitive communities, where hostilities are always imminent and rivers the sole means of communication. The defensive works of the mound-builders in great numbers occupied such river peninsulas. The neck of the loop was fortified by a single or double line of ditch and earthen wall, constructed from bank to bank of the encircling stream.[722] This was exactly the location of Vesontio, now Besancon, once the ancient stronghold of the Sequani in eastern Gaul. It was situated in a loop of the Dubis, so nearly a circle that its course seems to have been "described by a compass," Caesar says, while fortifications across the isthmus made the position of the town almost impregnable.[723] Verona, lying at the exit of the great martial highway of the Brenner Pass, occupies just such a loop of the Adige, as does Capua on the Volturno, and Berne on the Aare. Shrewsbury, in the Middle Ages an important military point for the preservation of order on the marches of Wales, is almost encircled by the River Severn, while a castle on the neck of the peninsula completes the defense on the land side.[724] Graaf Reinett, at one time an exposed frontier settlement of the Dutch in Cape Colony, had a natural moat around it in the Sunday River, which here describes three-fourths of a circle.

[Sidenote: River islands as sites of trading posts and colonies.]

The need of protection felt by all colonists in new countries amid savage or barbarous people whom encroachment sooner or later makes hostile, leads them if possible to place their first trading posts and settlements on river islands, especially at the mouth of the streams, where a delta often affords the site required, and where the junction of ocean and river highway offers the best facilities for trade. A river island fixed the location of the English settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, the French at Montreal and New Orleans, the Dutch at Manhattan and Van Renssellaer Island in the Hudson, the Swedes at Tinicum Island in the Delaware River a few miles below the mouth of the Schuylkill.[725] St. Louis, located on a delta island of the Senegal River, is one of the oldest European towns in West Africa;[726] and Bathurst, founded in 1618 on a similar site at the mouth of the Gambia, has for centuries now been the safe outlet for the trade of this stream.[727] Such island settlements at river mouths are a phenomenon of the outer edge of every coastal region; but inland stations for trade or military control also seek the protection of an island site. The Russians in the seventeenth century secured their downstream conquest of the Amur by a succession of river island forts,[728] which recall Colonel Byrd's early frontier post on an island in the Holston River, and George Rogers Clark's military stockade on Corn Island in the Ohio, which became the nucleus of the later city of Louisville.

[Sidenote: Swamps as barriers and boundaries.]

More effective than rivers in the protection which they afford are swamps. Neither solid land nor navigable water, their sluggish, passive surface raises an obstacle of pure inertia to the movements of mankind. Hence they form one of those natural boundaries that segregate. In southern England, Ronmey Marsh, reinforced by the Wealden Forest, fixed the western boundary of the ancient Saxon kingdom of Kent by blocking expansion in that direction, just as the bordering swamps of the Lea and Colne rivers formed the eastern and western boundaries of Middlesex.[729] The Fenland of the Wash, which extended in Saxon days from the highland about Lincoln south to Cambridge and Newmarket, served to hem in the Angles of Norfolk and Suffolk on the west, so that the occupation of the interior was left to later bands who entered by the estuaries of the Humber and Forth.[730] In northern Germany, the low cross valleys of the Spree, Havel and Netze rivers, bordered by alder swamps, were long a serious obstacle to communication, and therefore became boundaries of districts,[731] just as the Bourtanger Moor drew the dividing line between Holland and Hanover.

[Sidenote: Swamps as regions of survival.]

Swamp-bordered regions, as areas of natural isolation, guard and keep intact the people which they hold. Therefore they are regions of survival of race and language. The scattered islets of the Fens of England furnished an asylum to the early British Celts from Teutonic attacks,[732] and later protected them against dominant infusion of Teutonic blood. Hence to-day in the Fenland and in the district just to the south we find a darker, shorter people than in the country to the east or west.[733] Similarly the White Russians, occupying the poor, marshy region of uncertain watershed between the sources of the Duna, Dnieper and Volga, have the purest blood of all the eastern Slavs, though this distinction is coupled with poverty and retarded culture,[734] a combination that anthropo-geography often reveals. Wholly distinct from the Russians and segregated from them by a barrier of swampy forests, we find the Letto-Lithuanians in the Baltic province of Courland, speaking the most primitive form of flectional languages classed as Aryan. The isolation which preserved their archaic speech, of all European tongues the nearest to the Sanskrit, made them the last European people to accept Christianity.[735] The great race of the Slavic Wends, who once occupied all northern Germany between the Vistula and Elbe, has left only a small and declining remnant of its language in the swampy forests about the sources of the Spree.[736] [See ethnographical map, p. 223.] The band of marshlands stretching through Holland from the shallow Zuyder Zee east to the German frontier, has given to Friesland and the coast islands of Holland a peculiar isolation, which has favored the development and survival of the peculiar Friesian dialect, that speech so nearly allied to Saxon English, and has preserved here the purest type of the tall, blond Teuton among the otherwise mixed stock of the Netherlands.[737]

[Sidenote: Swamps as places of refuge.]

Inaccessible to all except those familiar with their treacherous paths and labyrinthine channels, swamps have always afforded a refuge for individuals and peoples; and therefore as places of defense they have played no inconspicuous part in history. What the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and the cypress swamps of Louisiana were to the run-away slaves, that the Everglades of Florida have been to the defeated Seminoles. In that half-solid, half-fluid area, penetrable only to the native Indian who poles his canoe along its tortuous channels of liquid mud, the Seminoles have set up their villages on the scattered hummocks of solid land, and there maintained themselves, a tribe of 350 souls, despite all efforts of the United States government to remove them to the Indian Territory. The swamps of the Nile delta have been the asylum of Egyptian independence from the time King Amysis took refuge there for fifty years during an invasion of the Ethiopians,[738] to the retreat thither of Amyrtaeus, a prince of Sais, after his unsuccessful revolt against the Persian conqueror Artaxerxes I.[739] The Isle of Athelney among the marshes of the Parret River afforded a refuge to Alfred the Great and a band of his followers during the Danish invasion of Wessex in 878,[740] while the Isle of Ely in the Fenland was another point of sustained resistance to the invaders. It was the Fenland that two hundred years later was the last stronghold of Saxon resistance to William of Normandy. Here on the Isle of Ely the outlawed leader Hereward maintained Saxon independence, till the Conqueror at last constructed a long causeway across the marshes to the "Camp of Refuge."[741]

[Sidenote: The spirit of the marshes.]

The spirit of the marshlands is the spirit of freedom. Therefore these small and scarcely habitable portions of the land assume an historical dignity and generate stirring historical events out of all proportion to their size and population. Their content is ethical rather than economic. They attract to their fastnesses the vigorous souls protesting against conquest or oppression, and then by their natural protection sustain and nourish the spirit of liberty. It was the water-soaked lowlands of the Rhine that enabled the early Batavians,[742] Ditmarscher and Frieslanders to assert and to maintain their independence, generated the love of Independence among the Dutch and helped them defend their liberty against the Spanish[743] and French. So the Fenland of England was the center of resistance to the despotism of King John, who therefore fixed his headquarters for the suppression of the revolt at Lincoln and his military depot at Lynn. Later in the conflict of the barons with Henry III, Simon de Montfort and other disaffected nobles entrenched themselves in the islands of Ely and Axholm, till the Provisions of Oxford in 1267 secured them some degree of constitutional rights.[744] Four centuries later the same spirit sent many Fenlanders to the support of Cromwell.

[Sidenote: Economic and political importance of lakes.]

A river that spreads out into the indeterminate earthform of a marsh is an effective barrier; but one that gathers waters into a natural basin and forms a lake retains the uniting power of a navigable stream and also, by the extension of its area and elimination of its current, approaches the nature of an enclosed sea. Mountain rivers, characterized by small volume and turbulent flow, first become navigable when they check their impetuosity and gather their store of water in some lake basin. The whole course of the upper Rhone, from its glacier source on the slope of Mount Furca to its confluence with the Saone at Lyon, is unfit for navigation, except where it lingers in Lake Geneva. The same thing is true of the Reuss in Lake Lucerne, the upper Rhine in Lake Constance, the Aare in Thun and Brienze, and the Linth in Lake Zurich. Hence such torrent-fed lakes assume economic and political importance in mountainous regions, owing to the paucity of navigable waterways. The lakes of Alpine Switzerland and Italy and of Highland Scotland form so many centers of intercourse and exchange. Even such small bodies of water as the Alpine lakes have therefore become goals of expansion, so that we find the shores of Geneva, Maggiore, Lugano, and Garda, each shared by two countries. Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, and the three German states of Baden, Wurtemberg and Bavaria, have all managed to secure a frontage upon Lake Constance. Lake Titicaca, lying 12,661 feet (3854 meters) above sea level but affording a navigable course 136 miles (220 kilometers) long, is an important waterway for Peru and Bolivia. In the central Sudan, where aridity reduces the volume of all streams, even the variable and indeterminate Lake Chad has been an eagerly sought objective for expanding boundaries. Twenty years ago it was divided among the native states of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem; today it is shared by British Nigeria, French Sudan, and German Kamerun. The erratic northern extension of the German boundary betrays the effort to reach this goal.

[Sidenote: Lakes as nuclei of states.]

The uniting power of lakes manifests itself in the tendency of such basins to become the nuclei of states. Attractive to settlement in primitive times, because of the protected frontier they afford—a motive finding its most emphatic expression in the pile villages of the early lake-dwellers—later because of the fertility of their bordering soil and the opportunity for friendly intercourse, they gradually unite their shores in a mesh of reciprocal relations, which finds its ultimate expression in political union. It is a significant fact that the Swiss Confederation originated in the four forest cantons of Lucerne, Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, which are linked together by the jagged basin of Lake Lucerne or the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, as the Swiss significantly call it, but are otherwise divided by mountain barriers. So we find that Lake Titicaca was the cradle of the Inca Empire, just as Lake Tezcoco was that of the Toltecs in Mexico and an island in Lake Chalco later that of the Aztec domain.[745] The most stable of the short-lived native states of Africa have apparently found an element of strength and permanence in a protected lake frontier. Such are the petty kingdoms of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem on Lake Chad, and Uganda on Victoria Nyanza.

Large lakes, which include in their area islands, peninsulas, tides, currents, fiords, inlets, deltas, and dunes, and present every geographical feature of an enclosed sea, approach the latter too in historical importance. Some of the largest, however, have long borne the name of seas. The Caspian, which exceeds the Baltic in area, and the Aral, which outranks Lake Michigan, show the closest physical resemblance to thalassic basins, because of their size, salinity and enclosed drainage systems; but their anthropo-geographical significance is slight. The very salinity which groups them with the sea points to an arid climate that forever deprives them of the densely populated coasts characteristic of most enclosed seas, and hence reduces their historical importance. Their tributary streams, robbed of their water by irrigation canals, like "the shorn and parcelled Oxus", renounce their function of highways into the interior. To this rule the Volga is a unique exception. Finally, cut off from union with the ocean, these salt lakes lose the supreme historical advantage which is maintained by freshwater lakes, like Ladoga, Nyassa, Maracaibo and the Great Lakes of North America, all lying near sea level.

[Sidenote: Lakes as fresh water seas.]

Lakes as part of a system of inland waterways may possess commercial importance surpassing that of many seas. This depends upon the productivity, accessibility and extent of their hinterland, and this in turn depends upon the size and shape of the inland basin. The chain of the five Great Lakes, which together present a coastline of four thousand miles and a navigable course as long as the Baltic between the Skager Rack and the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, constitutes a freshwater Mediterranean. It has played the part of an enclosed sea in American history and has enabled the Atlantic trade to penetrate 1400 miles inland to Chicago and Duluth. Its shores have therefore been a coveted object of territorial expansion. The early Dutch trading posts headed up the Hudson and Mohawk toward Lake Ontario, as did the English settlements which succeeded them. The French, from their vantage point at Montreal, threw out a frail casting-net of fur stations and missions, which caught and held all the Lakes for a time. Later the American shores were divided among eight of our states. The northern boundaries of Indiana and Illinois were fixed by Congress for the express purpose of giving these commonwealths access to Lake Michigan. Pennsylvania with great difficulty succeeded in protruding her northwestern frontier to cover a meager strip of Erie coast, while New York's frontage on the same lake became during the period of canal and early railroad construction, a great factor in her development.

In 1901, the tonnage of our merchant vessels on the Great Lakes was half that of our Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts combined,[746] constituting a freshwater fleet greater than the merchant marine of either France or sea-bred Norway. A remote but by no means faint echo of this fact is found in the five hundred or more boats, equally available for trade or war, which Henry M. Stanley saw the Uganda prince muster on the shore of Victoria Nyanza Lake. Ocean, sea, bay, estuary, river, swamp, lake: here is Nature's great circle returning upon itself, a circle faintly notched into arcs, but one in itself and one in man's uses.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XI

[630] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp. 26-27. New York and London, 1900.

[631] Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, p. 492. Boston, 1892.

[632] Capt. James Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 1776-1780, Vol. II, pp. 321-332. New York, 1796.

[633] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 63-66, 84-86, 95, 96. London, 1904.

[634] E. Lavisse, Histoire de France, Vol. II, Part I, pp. 374-375, 378-379, 381-382, 385-386. Paris, 1903.

[635] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191, map. New York, 1902-1906.

[636] Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 192-194.

[637] G.W. Kitchen, History of France, Vol. I, pp. 59-60. Oxford, 1892.

[638] Dietrich Schaeffer, Die Hansestaedte und Koenig Waldemar von Daenemark, p. 36. Jena, 1879.

[639] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 311. London, 1904.

[640] Capt. A.T. Mahan, The Problem of Asia, pp. 41, 60, 120. New York, 1900.

[641] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp. 97-98. New York and London, 1900.

[642] E.C. Semple, Development of the Hanse Towns in Relation to their Geographic Environment, Bulletin Amer. Geog. Soc., Vol. 31. No. 3. 1899.

[643] Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 519-530, 552. New York, 1882. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, Note pp. 278-281. New York, 1902.

[644] Agnes Laut, Voyagers of the Northern Ocean, Harper's Magazine, January, 1906.

[645] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 21-54. New York, 1899.

[646] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 198-190, 251-257. New York, 1896.

[647] Ibid., p. 38.

[648] D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 71, 177. New York, 1858.

[649] W. Deecke, Italy, p. 87. London, 1904.

[650] G. Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, map facing p. 167; also pp. 287, 327-328. New York, 1897.

[651] F.M. Stapff, Karte des unteren Khiusebthal, Petermanns Mitteilungen, p. 202. July, 1885.

[652] Strabo, Book III, chap. II, 4.

[653] For full discussion, see Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses. Stuttgart, 1889.

[654] Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. I, pp. 24-28. Boston, 1886.

[655] A.B. Hulbert, Historic Highways of America, Vol. VII, Portage Paths, pp. 182-183, 187-188. Cleveland, 1903.

[656] Herodotus, Book I, 194. A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, Vol. II, pp. 79-81. New York, 1849.

[657] Charles W. Hawes, The Uttermost East, p. 60. New York, 1904.

[658] Transportation by Water in 1906, Table 30, p. 181. Report of Department of Commerce and Labor, Washington, 1908.

[659] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 277. London, 1904.

[660] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 466. London. 1882.

[661] J. Ellis Barker, Modern Germany, pp. 68-85. London, 1907.

[662] Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, p. 218. Leipzig, 1897.

[663] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 466. London, 1882.

[664] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 511. London, 1904.

[665] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 318. London, 1903.

[666] Ratzel, Politische Geographie, pp. 739-740. Munich, 1903.

[667] Annual Register for 1901, p. 358. New Series, London and New York, 1902.

[668] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 958. New York, 1902.

[669] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 473. London, 1896-1898.

[670] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 406. New York, 1902.

[671] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, map p. 312. London, 1904.

[672] Blanqui, History of Political Economy, pp. 273, 277, 296. New York, 1880.

[673] Albert Gallatin, American State Papers, Misc. Doc., Vol. I, No. 250. Washington, 1834.

[674] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, pp. 449, 453-454. Stuttgart, 1889.

[675] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 530-531. New York, 1902.

[676] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 310, 312. London, 1904.

[677] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 314. London, 1903.

[678] Statesman's Yearbook for 1907.

[679] Henry Norman, All the Russias, pp. 254-255, 285-292. New York, 1902.

[680] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 251-255. Boston, 1903.

[681] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 6. London, 1897.

[682] Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 7.

[683] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 361-362. New York, 1899.

[684] Angus Hamilton, Afghanistan, pp. 137-141. New York and London, 1906. Henry Norman, All the Russias, pp. 276-277. New York, 1902.

[685] Bella Gallico, Book IV, chap. IV.

[686] Ibid., Book I, chap. XXXI; Book II, chap. III; Book IV, chap. I.

[687] Journals of Dr. Thomas Walker and Christopher Gist, p. 129. Filson Club Publications, Louisville, 1898.

[688] H.R. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. III, pp. 248-249. Philadelphia, 1853.

[689] Martha K. Genthe, The Valley Towns of Connecticut, Bull. of Amer. Geog. Society, Vol. 39, pp. 1-7. New York, 1907.

[690] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 181-182, 192. London, 1898.

[691] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 495. New York, 1902.

[692] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 284-285. New York, 1899.

[693] Ibid., Maps pp. 222, 340, 350.

[694] Ibid., Maps pp. 402, 429.

[695] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 43, 241. London, 1903.

[696] Ibid., p. 69. Sydow-Wagner, Methodischer Schul-Atlas, compare maps No. 13 and No. 25.

[697] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 380, 389-390. New York, 1882.

[698] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 318, map. New York, 1899.

[699] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 202-203. London, 1904.

[700] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 168, 169, 232, 306-307. London, 1907.

[701] Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 102, 642. New York, 1858.

[702] See Century Atlas, maps of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas for boundary line of 1850.

[703] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 57. London, 1905.

[704] Strabo, Book X, chap. II, 19.

[705] Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. II, pp. 120-124, 155-158, 168, 169, 173, 176, 177, 182, 266-274, 327. New York, 1879.

[706] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 252, 269-270. London, 1907.

[707] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189, 192-194. New York, 1902-1906.

[708] Cyrus Thomas, Mound Explorations, pp. 526-527, 531, 551. Twelfth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1894.

[709] Parkman, The Old Regime in Canada, pp. 292-303. Boston, 1904. E.C. Semple, The Influences of Geographic Environment on the Lower St. Lawrence, Bull. of Amer. Geog. Society, Vol. 36, pp. 449-466. 1904.

[710] Martha Krug Genthe, Valley Towns of Connecticut, pp. 10-12, figures V. and VI, Bull. of Amer. Geog. Society, Vol. 39, 1907.

[711] J. Nacken, Die Provinz Kwantung und ihre Bevoelkerung, Petermanns Mitteilungen, Vol. 24, p. 421, 1878. W.M. Wood, Fankwei, pp. 276-277. New York, 1859.

[712] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 19-22, 38. New York, 1896.

[713] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp. 164, 174-175, 179, 182, 189, 215. London and New York, 1900.

[714] William Walton, Paris, Vol. I, pp. 31-32, 35. Philadelphia, 1899.

[715] Caesar, Bella Gallico, Book VIII, chaps, 57, 58.

[716] Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. II, pp. 227-228. New York, 1879.

[717] Article, Cossack, Encyclopedia Britannica.

[718] Parkman, The Jesuits in North. America, pp. 292-303, 498-505, 534, 535. Boston, 1904.

[719] Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 100, 102. New York, 1858.

[720] Livingstone, Last Journals, Vol. I, p. 359. London, 1874.

[721] Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. II, pp. 64, 66, 233. New York, 1857. Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 237, 303-304, 320, 331-336; Vol. II, pp. 54, 56-58, 67-68, 96-99, 104-105. London, 1907.

[722] J.P. McLean, The Mound Builders, p. 20. Cincinnati, 1904. Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, pp. 6, 9, 10. New York, 1848.

[723] Caesar, Bello Gallico, Book I, chaps. 38, 39.

[724] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 101-102. New York, 1882.

[725] John Fiske, Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, Vol. I, p. 241. Boston.

[726] H.E. Mill, International Geography, p. 956. New York, 1902.

[727] H.B. George, Historical Geography of the British Empire, pp. 259-260. London, 1904.

[728] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 30-33, 50. New York, 1899.

[729] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 198-199. London, 1904.

[730] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 63, 66. London, 1904.

[731] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 102. London, 1903.

[732] Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland Past and Present, pp. 10, 11, 27-30. London, 1878.

[733] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 322-323. Map p. 327. New York, 1899.

[734] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, p. 108. New York, 1893.

[735] Ibid., pp. 104-106. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 340-342, 352, 365. New York, 1899.

[736] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 135. London, 1903.

[737] Ibid., p. 133. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 294-295. New York, 1899.

[738] Herodotus, II, 137, 140.

[739] Thucydides, I, 110. Brugsch-Bey, History of Egypt, Vol. II, p. 333. London, 1881.

[740] John Richard Green, History of the English People, Vol. I, chap. III, p. 71.

[741] Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland Past and Present, pp. 83, 101, 104, 107, 108. London, 1878.

[742] Tacitus, History of the Germans, Book VI, chap. VI. Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, Vol. I, pp. 2-5, 13. New York, 1885.

[743] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 299. London, 1903.

[744] Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland Past and Present, pp. 113-114. London, 1878.

[745] Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. I, pp. 327-328, 502-503. Oxford, 1892. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 163. London, 1896-1898.

[746] U.S. Report of Commission of Navigation, p. 10. Washington, 1901.



CHAPTER XII

CONTINENTS AND THEIR PENINSULAS

[Sidenote: Insularity of the land-masses.]

The division of the earth's surface into 28 per cent. land and 72 per cent. water is an all important fact of physical geography and anthropo-geography. Owing to this proportion, the land-masses, which alone provide habitats for man, rise as islands out of the three-fold larger surface of the uninhabitable ocean. Consequently, the human species, like the other forms of terrestrial life, bears a deeply ingrained insular character. Moreover, the water causes different degrees of separation between the land-masses, according as it appears as inlet, strait, sea, an island-strewn or islandless ocean; it determines the grouping of the habitable areas and consequently the geographic basis of the various degrees of ethnic and cultural kinship between the divisions of land. Finally, since the sea is for man only a highway to some ulterior shore, this geography of the land-masses in relation to the encompassing waters points the routes and goals of human wanderings.

Each fragment of habitable land, large or small, continent or islet, means a corresponding group or detachment of the vast human family. Its size fixes the area at the service of the group which occupies it. Its location, however, may either endow it with a neighborliness like that subsisting between Africa and Europe and involving an interwoven history; or remoteness like that of South America from Australia, so complete that even the close net of intercourse thrown by modern commerce over the whole world has scarcely sufficed to bring them into touch. Therefore the highly irregular distribution of the land areas, here compactly grouped, there remote, deserves especial attention, since it produces far-reaching results. Finally, continents and islands, by their zonal situation, their land forms, rainfall, river systems, flora and fauna, produce for man varied life conditions, which in their turn are partially dependent upon the size and grouping of the land-masses.

[Sidenote: Classification of land-masses according to size and location.]

A comparison of the large and small land-masses of the from the standpoint of both physical and anthropological geography yields a classification based upon size and location on the one hand, and historical influences on the other. The following table indicates the relation between the two.

I. Independent Land-masses.

A. Continents. Independent by reason of size, which enables them to support a large number of people and afford the conditions for civilization.

(a) Insular continents, whose primitive and modern development are marked by remoteness. Australia.

(b) Neighboring continents, separated by narrow seas and showing community of historical events. Europe and Africa. Asia and North America around Bering Sea.

B. Islands. Independent by reason of location.

(a) Oceanic islands, characterized by greatest remoteness from continents and other islands, and also by independent or detached history. St. Helena and Iceland.

(b) Member of a group of oceanic islands, therefore less independent. Hawaii, Fayal in the Azores, Tongatabu.

(c) Large islands, approaching by reason of size the independence of continents and thereby finding compensation for a less independent location. New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar; in a cultural sense, Great Britain and Japan.

II. Dependent Land-masses.

(a) Inshore or coast islands, whose history is intimately connected with that of the nearby mainland. Euboea, Long Island, Vancouver, Sakhalin, Ceylon.

(b) Neighboring islands, showing less intimate historical relations. Formosa, the Canaries, Ireland in contrast to Great Britain.

(c) Islands of enclosed or marginal seas, contained in a circle of lands and exposed to constant intercourse from all sides. Jamaica, Java, Crete, Sicily, Zealand, Gotland, St. Lawrence in Bering Sea.

(d) Island groups not to be considered apart from other groups. Samoa, Fiji and Friendly Isles; Philippine, Sulu and Sunda Islands; Greater and Lesser Antilles.

[Sidenote: Effect of size of land-masses.]

As the homes of man, these land-masses vary greatly owing to difference of size. Only the six continents have been large enough to generate great bodies of people, to produce differentiated branches of the human family, and to maintain them in such numerical force that alien intermixtures were powerless essentially to modify the gradually developing ethnic type. The larger continents are marked by such diversity of climate, relief and contour, that they have afforded the varied environments and the area for the development of several great types or sub-types of mankind. Australia has been just large enough to produce one distinct native race, the result of a very ancient blend of Papuan and Malayan stocks. But prevailing aridity has cast a mantle of monotony over most of the continent, nullifying many local geographic differences in highland and lowland, curtailing the available area of its already restricted surface, and hence checking the differentiation that results either from the competition of large numbers or from a varied environment. We find Australia characterized above all other continents by monotony of culture, mode of life, customs, languages, and a uniform race type from the Murray River to York peninsula.[747] The twin continents of the Americas developed a race singularly uniform in its physical traits,[748] if we leave out of account the markedly divergent Eskimos, but displaying a wide range of political, social and economic developments, from the small, unorganized groups of wandering savages, like the desert Shoshones and coast Fuegians, to the large, stable empire of the Incas, with intensive agriculture, public works, a state religion and an enlightened government.

Even the largest islands of the world, such as Borneo, New Guinea and Madagascar, show no such independent ethnic development. This is the distinguishing characteristic of the largest land-masses. Europe, except on the basis of its size and peninsula form, has no title to the name of continent; certainly not on anthropo-geographical grounds. Its classification as a continent arose in the Mediterranean among the Greeks, as a geographical expression of the antagonism between themselves and their Carian, Phoenician and Persian enemies across the Aegean; the idea had therefore a political origin, and was formed without knowledge of that vast stretch of plains between the Black Sea and the Arctic Ocean, where Asia's climate and races lap over into Europe, and where to-day we find the Muscovite Empire, in point of geographic conditions, its underlying ethnic stock and form of government, as much Asiatic as European. The real or western Europe, which the Roman Empire gradually added to the narrow Europe of the Greeks, and which is strikingly contrasted to Asia in point of size, relief, contour, climate and races, only served to maintain the distinction between the two continents in men's minds. But from a geographical standpoint the distinction is an error. It has confused the interpretation of the history of the Greeks and the development of the Russians. It has brought disorder into the question of the European or Asiatic origin of the Aryan linguistic family, which the anthropo-geographer would assign to the single continent of Eurasia. The independent development that falls to the lot of great world islands like the Americas and Australia is impossible in a peninsular continent like Europe, large as it is.

[Sidenote: Independence of location versus independence of size.]

The independence of a land-mass is based not alone on size: there is also an independence of location. This, owing to the spherical form of the earth, tends to be neutralized by the independence based upon large area. The larger a land-mass is, the nearer it approaches to others. Eurasia, the largest of all the continents, comes into close proximity and therefore close relations with Africa, North America, and even Australia; whereas Australia is at once the smallest and the most isolated of the continents. The remote oceanic islands of the Atlantic Ocean, measuring only a few square miles in area, have a location so independent of other inhabited lands, that before the period of the great discoveries they had never appeared on the horizon of man.

[Sidenote: The case of Asia.]

Asia's size and central location to the other continents were formerly taken as an argument for its correspondingly significant position in the creation and history of man. Its central location is reflected in the hypothesis of the Asiatic origin of the Indo-European linguistic group of peoples; and though the theory has been justly called into question, these peoples have undoubtedly been subjected to Asiatic influences. The same thing is true of the native American race, both as to Asiatic origin and influences; because the approximation of Siberia to Alaska is too close to exclude human relations between the two continents. The Malays, too, were probably sprung from the soil of southeastern Asia and spread thence over their close-packed Archipelago. Even the native Australians betray a Malayan and therefore Asiatic element in their composition,[749] while the same element can be traced yet more distinctly in the widely scattered Polynesians and the Hovas of Madagascar. This radiation of races seems to reflect Asia's location at the core of the land-masses. Yet the capacity to form such centers of ethnic distribution is not necessarily limited to the largest continents; history teaches us that small areas which have early achieved a relatively dense population are prone to scatter far their seeds of nations.

[Sidenote: Location of hemispheres and ethnic kinship.]

The continents harbor the most widely different races where they are farthest apart; where they converge most nearly, they show the closest ethnic kinships. The same principle becomes apparent in their plants and animals. The distribution of the land-masses over the earth is conspicuous for their convergence in the north and divergence in long peninsular forms toward the south. The contrasted grouping is reflected in both, the lower animals and the peoples inhabiting these respectively vicinal and remote lands. Only where North America and Eurasia stretch out arms to one another around the polar sea do Eastern and Western Hemisphere show a community of mammalian forms. These are all strictly Arctic animals, such as the reindeer, elk, Arctic fox, glutton and ermine.[750] This is the Boreal sub-region of the Holoarctic zoological realm, characterized by a very homogeneous and very limited fauna.[751] In contrast, the portion of the hemispheres lying south of the Tropic of Cancer is divided into four distinct zoological realms, corresponding to Central and South America, Africa south of Sahara, the two Indian peninsulas with the adjacent islands, and Australia.[752] But when we consider the continental extremities projecting beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, where geographic divergence reaches a climax, we find their faunas and floras utterly dissimilar, despite the fact that climate and physical conditions are very similar.[753] We find also widely divergent races in the southern sections of Africa, Australia or Tasmania and South America, while Arctic Eurasia and America come as near meeting ethnically as they do geographically. Here and here only both Eastern and Western Hemisphere show a strong affinity of race. The Eskimo, long classed as Mongoloid, are now regarded as an aberrant variety of the American race, owing to their narrow headform and linguistic affinity; though in Alaska even their headform closely approximates the Mongoloid Siberian type.[754] But in stature, color, oblique eyes, broad flat face, and high cheek bones, in his temperament and character, artistic productions and some aspects of his culture, he groups with the Asiatic Hyperboreans across the narrow sixty miles of water forming Bering Strait.[755] In the northern part of the earth's land area, the distribution of floras, faunas, and races shows interdependence, intercourse; in the southern, separation, isolation.

[Sidenote: Continental convergence and ethnic kinship.]

What is true where the hemispheres come together is true also where continents converge. The core of the Old World is found in the Mediterranean basin where Europe, Asia and Africa form a close circle of lands and where they are inhabited by the one white Mediterranean race. Contrast their racial unity about this common center with the extremes of ethnic divergence in their remote peripheries, where Teutons, Mongols, Malays and Negroes differ widely from the Mediterranean stock and from each other. Eastern Australia represents the ethnic antipodes of western Asia, in harmony with the great dividing distance between them, but the sides of these continents facing each other across the bridge of the Sunda Islands are sparsely strewn with a common Malay element.

[Sidenote: Africa's location.]

Africa's early development was never helped by the fact that the continent lay between Asia and South America. It was subjected to strong and persistent Asiatic Influences, but apparently to no native American ones. From that far-off trans-Atlantic shore came no signs of life. Africa appears in history as an appendage of Asia, a cultural peninsula of the larger continent. This was due not only to the Suez Isthmus and the narrowness of the Red Sea rift, but to its one-sided invasion by Asiatic races and trade from the east, while the western side of the continent lay buried in sleep, unstirred by any voice from the silent shores of America. Semitic influences, in successive waves, spread over the Dark Continent as far as Morocco, the Senegal, Niger, Lake Chad, Nyanza, Tanganyika and Nyassa, and gave it such light as it had before the 16th century. Only after the Atlantic gulf was finally crossed did influences from the American side of the ocean begin to impinge upon the West African coast, first in the form of the slave and rum trade, then in the more humane aspect of the Liberian colony. But with the full development of the Atlantic period in history, we see all kinds of Atlantic influences, though chiefly from the Atlantic states of Europe, penetrating eastward into the heart of Africa, and there meeting other commercial and political activities pressing inland from the Indian Ocean.

[Sidenote: The Atlantic abyss.]

The long Atlantic rift between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which was such a potent factor in the primitive retardation of Africa is, from the standpoint of anthropo-geography, the most important feature in the distribution of the land-masses over the globe. Not till the discovery of America bridged this abyss did the known world become a girdle round the earth. Except the Norse ventures to the American continent by way of Iceland and Greenland between 1000 and 1347, no account of pre-Columbian intercourse between the two shores of the Atlantic has ever been substantiated. Columbus found the opposite land unfamiliar in race as in culture. He described the people as neither whites nor blacks, the two ethnic types which he knew on the eastern side of the Atlantic abyss. He and his successors found in the Americas only a Stone Age culture, a stage already outgrown by Europe and Africa. These continents from Lapland to the Hottentot country were using iron. Prior to the voyage of the great Genoese, Europe gave nothing to America and received nothing from it, except the Gulf Stream's scanty cargo of driftwood stranded on bleak Icelandic shores. The Tertiary land-bridge across the North Atlantic between Norway and Greenland may possibly have guided a pre-Caucasic migration to America and given that continent part of its aboriginal population.[756] However, no trace of any European stock remains.

[Sidenote: Atlantic islands uninhabited.]

The collapse of the bridge at the close of the Glacial Epoch left the Atlantic abyss effectually dividing the two hemispheres. Its islands, few and far between, were helpless to maintain intercourse between the opposite shores; this is proven by the fact that all of them from Greenland to Tristan da Cunha, excepting only the Canaries, were uninhabited at the time of their discovery. History records when the first bold voyagers came upon them in that unmarked waste of waters, and gave them their first occupants. The political upheavals of Norway in King Harfagr's time (872) sent to the Faroes and Iceland their first settlers, though these islands were previously known to the Celts of Ireland. The Norse colonists who went to Greenland in the year 1000 seem to have been the first regular settlers on those inhospitable coasts. They found no native inhabitants, but numerous abandoned dwellings, fragments of boats and stone implements,[757] which doubtless recorded the intermittent voyages thither of the Eskimo, preliminary to permanent occupation. The Scandinavians did not encounter natives on the island till the 12th century, when Greenland probably received its first Eskimo immigration.[758]

[Sidenote: Geographical character of the Pacific.]

While the Atlantic thus formed a long north-and-south rift across the inhabited world at the period of the great discoveries, the Pacific, strewn with islands and land-rimmed at its northern extremity by the peninsulas of Alaska and eastern Siberia, spread a nebula of population from the dense centers of Asia across to the outskirts of America. The general Mongoloid character of the American Indians as a race, the stronger Asiatic stamp of the Western Eskimo, the unmistakeable ethnic and cultural affinities of the Northwest Coast tribes both with southern Polynesians and Asiatics,[759] all point to America as the great eastern wing of the Mongoloid or Asiatic area, and therefore as the true Orient of the world.

Geographic conditions have made this possible or even probable. The winds and currents of the North Pacific set from Japan straight toward the American coast. Junks blown out to sea from China or Japan have been carried by the Kuro Siwo and the prevailing westerlies across the Pacific to our continent. There is record of a hundred instances of this occurrence.[760]

[Sidenote: Pacific affinities of North American Indians.]

The broken bridge across Bering Strait formed by East Cape, Cape Prince of Wales and the Diomede Islands between, and further south the natural causeway of the Commander and Aleutian Islands leading from the peninsula of Kamchatka to that of Unalaska, have facilitated intercourse between Asia and America.[761] Justin Winsor says, "There is hardly a stronger demonstration of such connection between the two continents than the physical resemblances of the peoples now living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in these upper latitudes."[762] This resemblance is by no means confined to the Eskimo and Chukches, who have exchanged colonists across Bering Sea. Recent investigations have revealed a wider kinship. The population of northern Siberia speaks in general Ural-Altaic languages, but it includes a few scattered tribes whose singular speech excludes them from this linguistic group, and who have therefore been placed by ethnologists in a distinct class called "paleasiatics" or "hyperboreans." This class is composed of the Ostyak and Kot on the Yenisei River, the Gilyak and Ainos at the mouth of the Amur and on the Kurile, Sakhalin and Yezo islands, the Kamchadal and Koryak of Kamchatka, and the Chukches and Yukaghir of extreme northeastern Siberia. As far back as 1850, the eminent philologist Robert Latham noted a marked linguistic agreement, both in structure and verbal affinity, between our Northwest Coast tribes and the peoples of the islands and peninsulas fringing northeastern Asia. "Koriak is notably American," he said.[763] The recent Jesup Expedition to the Northwest Coast of America and the nearby coast of Asia investigated the Koryak, to determine whether in the past there had been any connection between the cultures and ethnic types of the Old and New World. These investigations have proved beyond doubt a kinship of culture, attributable either to a remote common origin or to former contact, long and close, between these isolated Siberian tribes and the American aborigines. They show that the Koryak are one of the Asiatic tribes standing nearest to the northwestern American Indian.[764] [See map page 103.]

[Sidenote: Polynesian affinities.]

W.H. Dall finds the inhabitants of the Pacific slope of North America conspicuously allied with Oceanica in cultural achievements, whose origin he therefore assigns to that vast congeries of islands stretching from Asia toward South America in latitude 25 deg. south. These islands, closely clustered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with widening spaces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the indestructible memorials of a strange civilization, through Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the Peruvian coast. It is to be noted that these islands lie just outside the westward-bearing Equatorial Current and trade-winds, on the margin of the South Pacific anti-cyclonic winds and a southern current which sets towards the Peruvian coast.[765] A more probable avenue for the introduction of these Polynesian or Malayan elements of culture is found in O.T. Mason's theory, that primitive mariners of the southwestern Pacific, led into migration by the eternal food quest, may have skirted the seaboard of East Asia and Northwest America, passing along a great-circle route through the succession of marginal seas and archipelagoes to various ports of entry on the Pacific front of America. Such a route, favored by the prevailing marine currents and winds from the southwest, and used repeatedly during long periods of time, might have introduced trans-Pacific elements of race and culture into the western side of America.[766]

[Sidenote: The real Orient of the World.]

Moreover, primitive America resembled Oceanica and northern Asia in its ignorance of iron, in its Stone Age civilization, and its retarded social and political development. Such affinities as it shows were predominantly Pacific or trans-Pacific.[767] On its Atlantic side, it stood out in striking contrast to the contemporaneous civilizations and races in Europe and Africa; this was its unneighbored shore, lying on the eastern margin of that broad zone of habitation which stretched hence westward on and on around the world, to the outermost capes of Europe and Africa. The Atlantic abyss formed the single gap in this encircling belt of population, to which Columbus at last affixed the clasp. The Atlantic face of the Americas formed therefore the drowsy unstirred Orient of the inhabited world, which westward developed growing activity—dreaming a civilization in Mexico and Peru, roused to artistic and maritime achievement in Oceanica and the Malay Archipelago, to permanent state-making and real cultural development in Asia, and attaining the highest civilization at last in western Europe. There was the sunset margin of the inhabited world, the area of achievement, the adult Occident, facing across the dividing ocean that infant Orient beyond. Here the Old World, the full-grown world, had accumulated in Columbus' time the matured forces of a hemisphere; it was searching for some outlet across the shoreless distances of the Atlantic, waiting for some call from its voiceless beyond.

[Sidenote: The Atlantic abyss in historic movements of peoples.]

This deep, unbridged chasm of the Atlantic, closed only four hundred years ago, must be taken into account in all investigations of the geographical distribution of races, whether in prehistoric or historic times. The influences of those ages when it formed an impassable gulf are still operative in directing the movements of the peoples to-day inhabiting its shores, because that barrier maintained the continents of America as a vast territorial reserve, sparsely inhabited by a Stone Age people, and affording a fresh field for the superior, accumulated energies of Europe.

[Sidenote: Races and continents.]

Australia and the double continent of America show each the coincidence of an ethnic realm with an isolated continent. In contrast, when we come to the Old World triad of Europe, Asia and Africa, we find three races, to be sure, but races whose geographical distribution ignores the boundaries of the continents. The White race belongs to all three, and from time immemorial has made the central basin of the Mediterranean the white man's sea. The Mongolian, though primarily at home in Asia, stretches along the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic shores of Norway, and in historical times has penetrated up the Danube to the foot of the Alps. Nor was the Negroid stock confined to Africa, though Africa has always been its geographical core. The Indian Peninsula and Malay Archipelago, once peopled by a primitive Negroid race, but now harboring only remnants of them in the Deccan, Malacca, the Philippines and elsewhere, bridge the distance to the other great Negroid center in Melanesia and the derivative or secondary Negroid area of Australia.[768] The Negroid race belongs essentially to the long southern land pendants of the Eastern Hemisphere; and wherever it has bordered on the lighter northern stocks, it has drawn a typical boundary zone of mingled tints which never diverges far from the Equator, from the Atlantic shores of the Sudan to Pacific Fiji.[769] [See map page 105.]

The effort of the old ethnology, as represented by Blumenbach, to make a five-fold division of the races in agreement with the five continents was a mistake. To distinguish between the continents is one thing and to distinguish between the races is another. Neither bio-geography nor anthropo-geography can adopt the continents as geographical provinces, although floras, faunas and races the world over give evidence of partial or temporary restriction to a certain continent, whence they have overflowed to other lands. A ground-plan for the geographical classification of races is to be found, as Tylor says, in the fact that they are not found scattered indiscriminately over the earth's surface, but that certain races belong to certain regions, in whose peculiar environment they have developed their type, and whence they have spread to other lands, undergoing modifications from race intermixture and successive changes of environment on the way.[770]

[Sidenote: Contrast of the northern and southern continents.]

From this general law of race movements it follows that certain groups of land-masses, favored by location and large area, play a great imperial role, holding other lands as appanages. The Eastern Hemisphere, as we have seen, enjoys this advantage over the Western. Still more the Northern Hemisphere, blessed with an abundance of land and a predominant Temperate Zone location, is able to lord it over the Southern, so insular in its poverty of land. The history of the Northern Hemisphere is marked by far-reaching historical influences and wide control; that of the Southern, by detachment, aloofness and impotence, due to the small area and isolation of its land-masses. A subordinate role is its fate. Australia will always follow in the train of Eurasia, whence alone it has derived its incentives and means of progress. Neither the southern half of Africa nor South America has ever in historical times struck out a road to advancement unaided by its northern neighbors. Primitive South America developed the only independent civilization that ever blossomed in the Southern Hemisphere, but the Peruvian achievements in progress were inferior to those of Mexico and Central America.[771]

[Sidenote: Isolation of the southern continents.]

This subordination of the southern continents is partly due to the fact that they have only one side of contact or neighborhood with any other land, that is, on the north; yet even here the contact is not close. In Australia the medium of communication is a long bridge of islands; in America, a winding island chain and a mountainous isthmus; in Africa, a broad zone of desert dividing the Mediterranean or Eurasian from the tropical and Negroid part of the continent. Intercourse was not easy, and produced clear effects only in the case of Africa. Enlightenment filtering in here was sadly dimmed as it spread. Moreover it was delayed till the introduction from Asia of the horse and camel, which were not native to Africa, and which, as Ratzel points out, alone made possible the long journey across the Sahara. The opposite or peninsular sides, running out as great spurs from the compacter land-masses of the north, look southward into vacant wastes of water, find no neighbors in those Antarctic seas. Owing to this unfavorable location on the edge of things, they were historically dead until four centuries ago, when oceanic navigation opened up the great sea route of the Southern Hemisphere, and for the first time included them in the world's circle of communication. But even when lifted by the ensuing Europeanizing process, they only emphasize the fundamental dependence of the Southern Hemisphere upon the superior geographical endowments of the Northern.

[Sidenote: Effect of continental structure upon historical development.]

The build of the land-masses influences fundamentally the movements and hence the development of the races who inhabit them. A simple continental structure gives to those movements a few simple features and a wide monotonous distribution which checks differentiation. A manifold, complex build, varied in relief and ragged in contour, breaks up the moving streams of peoples, turns each branch into a different channel, lends it a distinctive character through isolation, finally brings it up in a cul de sac formed by a peninsula or mountain-rimmed basin, where further movement is checked and the process of local individualization begins. Therefore great simplicity of continental build may result in historical poverty, as in the flat quadrangle of European Russia, the level plateau of Africa, and the smooth Atlantic slope of North America, with its neatly trimmed outline. Complexity, abounding in contrasted environments, tends to produce a varied wealth of historical development. Africa lies on the surface of the ocean, a huge torso of a continent, headless, memberless, inert. Here is no diversity of outward form, no contrast of zonal location, no fructifying variety of geographic conditions. Humanity has forgotten to grow in its stationary soil. Only where the Suez Isthmus formed an umbilical cord uniting ancient Egypt to the mother continent of Asia was Africa vitalized by the pulse of another life. European influences penetrated little beyond the northern coast.

Asia, on the other hand, radiating great peninsulas, festooned with islands, supporting the vast corrugations of its highlands and lowlands, its snow-capped mountains and steaming valleys, stretching from the Equator through all the zones to the ice-blocked shores of the Arctic, knowing drought and deluge, tundra waste and teeming jungle, has offered the manifold environment and segregated areas for individualized civilizations, which have produced such far-reaching historical results. The same fact is true of Europe, and that in an intensified degree. Here a complex development of mountains and highlands built on diverse axes, peninsulas which comprise 27 per cent. and Islands which comprise nearly 8 per cent. of the total area,[772] vast thalassic inlets cleaving the continent to the core, have provided an abundance of those naturally defined regions which serve as cradles of civilization and, reacting upon the continent as a whole, endow it with lasting historical significance.[773] Even Strabo saw this. He begins his description of the inhabited world with Europe, because, as he says, it has such a "polymorphous formation" and is the region most favorable to the mental and social ennoblement of man.[774]

[Sidenote: Structure of North and South America.]

In North and South America, great simplicity of continental build gave rise to a corresponding simplicity of native ethnic and cultural condition. There is only one marked contrast throughout the length of this double continent, that between its Atlantic and Pacific slopes. On the Atlantic side of the Cordilleras, a vast trough extends through both land-masses from the Arctic Ocean to Patagonia; this has given to migration in each a longitudinal direction and therefore constantly tended to nullify the diversities arising from contrasted zonal conditions. On the Pacific side of North America, there has been an unmistakeable migration southward along the accessible coast from Alaska to the Columbia River, and down the great intermontane valleys of the western highlands from, the Great Basin to Honduras;[775] while South America shows the same meridional movement for 2,000 miles along the Pacific coast and longitudinal valleys of the Andes system. There was little encouragement to cut across the grain of the continents. The eastern range of the Cordilleras drew in general a dividing line between the eastern and western tribes.[776] Though Athapascans from the east overstepped it at a few points in North America, the Great Divide has served effectually to isolate the two groups from one another and to draw that line of linguistic cleavage which Major Powell has set down in Ms map of Indian linguistic stocks. Consequently, Americanists recognize a distinct resemblance among the members of the North Atlantic group of Indians, as among those of the South Atlantic group; but they note an equally distinct contrast between each of them and its corresponding Pacific group. Nor is this contrast superficial; it extends to physical traits, temperament and culture,[777] and appears in the use of the vigesimal system of enumeration in primitive Mexico, Central America, among the Tlingits of the Northwest coast and the Eskimo as also among the Chukches and Ainus of Asia, while in the Atlantic section of North America the decimal system, with one doubtful exception, was alone in use.[778]

[Sidenote: Cultural superiority of the Pacific slope Indians.]

To the anthropo-geographer, the significant fact is that all the higher phases of native civilization are confined to the Pacific slope group of Indians, which includes the Mexican and Isthmian tribes. From the elongated center of advanced culture stretching from the Bolivian highlands northward to the Anahuac Plateau, the same type shades off by easy transitions through northern Mexico and the Pueblo country, vanishes among the lower intrusive stocks of Oregon and California, only to reappear among the Haidas and Tlingits of British Columbia and Alaska, whose cultural achievements show affinity to those of the Mayas in Yucatan.[779] Dall found certain distinguishing customs or characteristics spread north and south along the western slope of the continent in a natural geographical line of migration. They included labretifery, tattooing the chin of adult women, certain uses of masks, a certain style of conventionalizing natural objects, the use of conventional signs as hieroglyphics, a peculiar facility in carving wood and stone, a similarity of angular designs on their pottery and basketry, and of artistic representations connected with their common religious or mythological ideas. Many singular forms of carvings and the method of superimposing figures of animals one upon another in their totem poles are found from Alaska to Panama, except in California. These distinguishing features of an incipient culture are found nowhere else in North America, even sporadically. Dall therefore concludes that "they have been impressed upon the American aboriginal world from without," and on the ground of affinities, attributes their origin to Oceanica.[780]

Cyrus Thomas, on the basis of the character and distribution of the archeological remains in North America, concurs in this opinion. He finds that these remains fall into two classes, one east of the Rocky Mountain watershed and the other west. "When those of the Pacific slope as a whole are compared with those of the Atlantic slope, there is a dissimilarity which marks them as the products of different races or as the result of different race influences." He emphasizes the resemblance of the customs, arts and archeological remains of the west coast to those of the opposite shores and islands of the Pacific, and notes the lack of any resemblance to those of the Atlantic; and finally leans to the conclusion that the continent was peopled from two sources, one incoming stream distributing itself over the Atlantic slope, and the other over the Pacific, the two becoming gradually fused into a comparatively homogeneous race by long continental isolation. Yet these two sources may not necessarily include a trans-Atlantic origin for one of the contributing streams; ethnic evidence is against such a supposition, because the characteristics of the American race and of the archeological remains point exclusively to affinity with the people of the Pacific.[781] John Edward Payne also reaches the same conclusion, though on other grounds.[782]

[Sidenote: Lack of segregated districts.]

The one strong segregating feature in primitive America was the Cordilleras, which held east and west apart. In the natural pockets formed by the high intermontane valleys of the Andes and the Anahuac Plateau, and in the constricted isthmian region, the continent afforded a few secluded localities where civilization found favorable conditions of development. But in general, the paucity of large coast articulations, and the adverse polar or subpolar location of most of these, the situation of the large tropical islands along that barren Atlantic abyss, and the lack of a broken or varied relief, have prevented the Americas from developing numerous local centers of civilization, which might eventually have lifted the cultural status of the continents.[783]

[Sidenote: Coast articulations of continents.]

It is necessary to distinguish two general classes of continental articulations; first, marginal dependences, like the fringe of European peninsulas and islands, resulting from a deeply serrated contour; and second, surface subdivisions of the interior, resulting from differences of relief or defined often by enclosing mountains or deserts, like the Tibetan Plateau, the Basin of Bohemia, the Po River trough, or the sand-rimmed valley of the Nile. The first class is by far the more important, because of the intense historical activity which results from the vitalizing contact with the sea. But in considering coast articulations, anthropo-geography is led astray unless it discriminates between these on the basis of size and location. Without stopping to discuss the obvious results of a contrasted zonal location, such as that between Labrador and Yucatan, the Kola Peninsula and Spain, it is necessary to keep in mind always the effect of vicinal location. An outlying coastal dependency like Ireland has had its history impoverished by excessive isolation, in contrast to the richer development of England, Jutland, and Zealand in the same latitude, because these have profited from the closer neighborhood of other peripheral regions. So from ancient times, Greece has had a similar advantage over the Crimea, the Tunisian Peninsula of North Africa over Spain, the Cotentin Peninsula of France over Brittany, and Kent over Cornwall or Caithness in Great Britain.

[Sidenote: Importance of size in continental articulations.]

Articulations on a vast scale, like the southern peninsulas of Asia, produce quite different cultural and historical effects from small physical sub-divisions, like the fiord promontories and "skerries" of Norway and southern Alaska, or the finger peninsulas of the Peloponnesus. The significant difference lies in the degree of isolation which the two types yield. Large continental dependencies of the Asiatic class resemble small continents in their power to segregate; while overgrown capes like ancient Attica and Argolis or the more bulky Peloponnesus have their exclusiveness tempered by the mediating power of the small marine inlets between them. Small articulations, by making a coast accessible, tend to counteract the excessive isolation of a large articulation. They themselves develop in their people only minor or inner differentiations, which serve to enrich the life of the island or peninsula as a whole, but do not invade its essential unity. The contrast in the history of Hellas and the Peloponnesus was due largely to their separation from one another; yet neither was able to make of its people anything but Greeks. Wales and Cornwall show in English history the same contrast and the same underlying unity.

[Sidenote: Historical contrast of large and small peninsulas.]

In discussing continental articulations, therefore, it makes a great difference whether we draw our deductions from small projections of the coast, like Wales, the Peloponnesus, Brittany and the Crimea, whose areas range from 7442 to 10,023 square miles (19,082 to 25,700 square kilometers); or the four Mediterranean peninsulas, which range in size from the 58,110 square miles (149,000 square kilometers) of the Apennine Peninsula to the 197,600 square miles (506,-600 square kilometers) of Asia Minor and the 227,700 square miles (584,000 square kilometers) of the Iberian; or the vast continental alcoves of southern Asia, like Farther India with its 650,000 square miles (1,667,000 square kilometers), Hither India with 814,320 square miles (2,088,000 square kilometers) and Arabia with 1,064,700 square miles (2,730,000 square kilometers).[784] The fact that the large compound peninsula of western Europe which comprises Spain, Portugal, France, Jutland, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Italy and western Germany, and has its base in the stricture between the Adriatic and the Baltic, is about the size of peninsular India, suggests how profound may be the difference in geographic effects between large and small peripheral divisions. The three huge extremities which Asia thrusts forward into the Indian Ocean are geographical entities, which in point of size and individualization rank just below the continents; and in relation to the solid mass of Central Asia, they have exhibited in many respects an aloofness and self-sufficiency, that have resulted in an historical divergence approximating that of the several continents. India, which has more productive territory than Australia and a population not much smaller than that of Europe, becomes to the administrators of its government "the Continent of India," as it is regularly termed in the Statistical Atlas published at Calcutta. Farther India has in the long-drawn pendant of Malacca a sub-peninsula half as large again as Italy. The Deccan has in Ceylon an insular dependency the size of Tasmania. The whole scale is continental. It appears again somewhat diminished, in the largest articulations of Europe, in Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas. This continental scale stamps also the anthropo-geography of such large individualized fields. They are big enough for each to comprise one or even several nations, and isolated enough to keep their historical processes for long periods at a time to a certain extent detached from those of their respective continents.

[Sidenote: Peninsular conditions most favorable to historical development.]

The most favorable conditions for historical development obtain where the two classes of marginal articulation are combined, and where they occur in groups, as we find them in the Mediterranean and the North Sea-Baltic basin. Here the smaller indentations multiply contact with the sea, and provide the harbors, bays and breakwaters of capes and promontories which make the coast accessible. The larger articulations, by their close grouping, break up the sea into the minor thalassic basins which encourage navigation, and thus insure the exchange of their respective cultural achievements. In other words, such conditions present the pre-eminent advantages of vicinal location around an enclosed sea.

The enormous articulations of southern Asia suffer from their paucity of small indentations, all the more because of their vast size and sub-tropical location. The Grecian type of peninsula, with its broken shoreline, finds here its large-scale homologue only in Farther India, to which the Sunda Islands have played in history the part of a gigantic Cyclades. The European type of articulation is found only about the Yellow-Japan Sea, where the island of Hondo and the peninsulas of Shangtung and Korea reproduce approximately the proportions of Great Britain, Jutland and Italy respectively. Arabia and India, like the angular shoulder of Africa which protrudes into the Indian Ocean, measure an imposing length of coastline, but this length shrinks in comparison with the vast area of the peninsulas. The contour of a peninsula is like the surface of the brain: in both it is convolutions that count. Southern Asia has had lobes enough but too few convolutions. For this reason, the northern Indian Ocean, despite its exceptional location as the eastward extension of the Mediterranean route to the Orient, found its development constantly arrested till the advent of European navigators.

[Sidenote: Length of coastline.]

Although the peripheral articulations of a continent differ anthropo-geographically according to their size, their zonal and vicinal location, yet large and small, arctic and tropical, are grouped indiscriminately together in the figures that state the length of coastlines. For this reason, statistics of continental coastlines have little value. For instance, the fact that Eurasia has 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) and North America 46,500 miles (75,000 kilometers) of contact with the ocean is not illuminating; these figures do not reveal the fact that the former has its greatest coastal length on its tropical and sub-tropical side, while the latter continent has wasted inlets and islands innumerable in the long, bleak stretch from Newfoundland poleward around to Bering Sea.

[Sidenote: The continental base of the peninsulas.]

Peninsulas are accessible from the sea according to the configuration of their coasts, but from their hinterland, according to the length and nature of their connection with the same. This determines the degree of their isolation from the land-mass. If they hang from the continent by a frayed string, as does the Peloponnesus, Crimea, Malacca, Indian Gutjerat, and Nova Scotia, they are segregated from the life of the mainland almost as completely as if they were islands. The same effects follow where the base of a peninsula is defined by a high mountain barrier, as in all the Mediterranean peninsulas, in the two Indias, and in Korea; or by a desert like that which scantily links Arabia to Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia; or by a blur of swamps and lakes such as half detaches Scandinavia, Courland, Estland and Finland from Russia.

Held to their continents by bonds that often fail to bind, subjected by their outward-facing peripheral location to every centrifugal force, feeling only slightly the pull of the great central mass behind, peninsulas are often further detached economically and historically by their own contrasted local conditions. A sharp transition in geological formation and therefore in soil, a difference of climate, rainfall, drainage system, of flora or fauna, serve greatly to emphasize the lack of community of interests with the continental interior, and therefore produce an inevitable diversity of historical development.[785] Hence, many peninsulas insulate their people as completely as islands. It is hard to say whether the Pyrenean peninsula or Sicily, Scandinavia or Great Britain, has held itself more aloof from the political history of remaining Europe; whether Korea is not more entitled to its name of the Hermit Kingdom than island Japan could ever be; whether the Peloponnesus or Euboea was more intimately associated with the radiant life of ancient Hellas. These questions lead to another, namely, whether a high mountain wall like the Pyrenees, or a narrow strait like that of Messina is the more effective geographical boundary.

[Sidenote: Continental base a zone of transition.]

Peninsulas not infrequently gain in breadth as they approach the continent; here they tend to abate their distinctive character as lobes of the mainland, together with the ethnic and historical marks of isolation. Here they form a doubtful boundary zone of mingled continental and peninsular development. Such peninsulas fall naturally, therefore, into a continental and a peninsular section, and reveal this segmentation in the differentiated history of the two portions. That great military geographer Napoleon distinguished the Italy of the Po basin as Italie continentale, and the Apennine section as Presqu'ile. Not only is the former broader, but, expanding like a tree trunk near the ground, it sends its roots well back into the massive interior of the continent; it is dominated more by the Alps than by the Apennines; it contains a lowland and a river of continental proportions, for which there is no space on the long, narrow spur of southern Italy. If its geographical character approximates that of the mainland, so does its ethnic and historical. The Po basin is a well defined area of race characterization, in which influences have made for intermixture. South of the crest of the Apennines the Italian language in its purity begins, in contrast to the Gallo-Italian of the north. This mountain ridge has also held apart the dark, short dolichocephalic stock of the Mediterranean race from the fairer, taller, broad-headed Celts, who have moved down into the Po basin from the Alps, and the Germans and Illyrians who have entered it from the northeast.[786] Northern Italy is therefore allied ethnically, as it has often been united politically, to the neighboring countries abutting upon the Alps, so that it has experienced only in a partial degree that detachment which has stamped the history of the Apennine section.

[Sidenote: Historical contrast between base and extremity.]

The Balkan Peninsula tells much the same story of contrasted geographic conditions and development in its continental and peninsular sections. Greece proper, in ancient as in modern times, reached its northern confines where the peninsula suddenly widens its base through Macedonia and Thrace. In this narrow southern section to-day, especially in isolated Peloponnesus, Attica, and the high-walled garden of Thessaly, are found people of the pure, long-headed, Hellenic type, and here the Greek language prevails.[787] But that broad and alien north, long excluded from the Amphictyonic Council and a stranger to Aegean culture in classical times, is occupied to-day by a congeries of Slavs, who form a southwestern spur of the Slav stock covering eastern Europe. Its political history shows how often it has been made a Danubian or continental state, by Alexander of Macedon, by the Romans, Bulgarians, and Ottoman Turks,[788] as it may be some day by Russia; and also how often its large and compact form has enabled it to dominate the tapering peninsular section to the south.

In the same way, the vast Ganges and Indus basins, which constitute the continental portion of India, have received various Tibetan, Scythian, Aryan, Pathan, and Mongol-Tartar ingredients from Central Asia; and by reason of the dense populations supported by these fruitful river plains, it has been able to dominate politically, religiously and culturally the protruding triangle of the Deccan. [See maps pages 8 and 102.] The continental side of Arabia, the Mesopotamian valley which ties the peninsula to the highlands of Persia and Armenia, has received into its Semitic stock constant infiltrations of Turanian and Aryan peoples from the core of Asia. This process has been going on from the ancient Elamite and Persian conquests of Mesopotamia down to the Ottoman invasion and the present periodic visits of Kurdish shepherds to the pastures of the upper Tigris.[789] Here we have the same contrast of geographic conditions as in Italy and India, a wide, populous alluvial plain occupying the continental section of the peninsula, and a less attractive highland or mountainous region in the outlying spur of land.

[Sidenote: Continental base a scene of invasion and war.]

These continental sections of peninsulas become therefore strongly marked as areas of ethnic characterization and differentiated historical development. Their threshold location, by reason of which they first catch any outward migration from the core of the continent, and their fertility, which serves as a perennial lure to new comers, whether peaceful or warlike, combine to give them intense historical activity. They catch the come and go between their wide hinterland and the projection of land beyond, the stimulus of new arrivals and fresh blood. But tragedy too is theirs. The Po Valley has been called "the cockpit of Europe." Even the little Eider, which marks the base of Jutland, has been the scene of war between Danes and Germans since the tenth century.[790] The Indus Valley has again and again felt the shock of conflict with invading hordes from the central highlands, and witnessed the establishment of a succession of empires. Peace at the gates of the Balkan Peninsula has never been of long duration, and the postern door of Korea has been stormed often enough.

[Sidenote: Peninsular extremities as areas of isolation.]

In contrast to these continental sections which stand in contact with the solid land-mass behind, the extremities of the peninsulas are areas of isolation and therefore generally of ethnic unity. They often represent the last stand of displaced people pressed outward into these narrow quarters by expanding races in their rear. The vast triangle of the Deccan, which forms the essentially peninsular part of India, is occupied, except in the more exposed northwest corner, by the Dravidian race which once occupied all India, and afterward was pushed southward by the influx of more energetic peoples.[791] Here they have preserved their speech and nationality unmixed and live in almost primitive simplicity.[792] In the peninsular parts of Great Britain, in northern Scotland. Wales and Cornwall, we find people of Celtic speech brought to bay on these remote spurs of the land, affiliating little with the varied folk which occupied the continental side of the island, and resisting conquest to the last.[793] The mountainous peninsula of western Connaught in Ireland has been the rocky nucleus of the largest Celtic-speaking community in the island.[794] Brittany, with a similar location, became the last refuge of Celtic speech on the mainland of Europe,[795] the seat of resistance to Norman and later to English conquest, finally the stronghold of conservatism in the French Revolution.

[Sidenote: Ethnic unity of peninsulas.]

The northern wall of the Apennines and the outpost barrier of the Alps have combined to protect peninsular Italy from extensive ethnic infusions from the direction of the continent. This portion of the country shows therefore, as the anthropological maps attest, a striking uniformity of race. It has been a melting-pot in which foreign elements, filtering through the breaches of the Apennines or along the southern coast, have been fused into the general population under the isolating and cohesive influences of a peninsular environment.[796] The population of the Iberian Peninsula is even more unified, probably the most homogeneous in Europe. Here the long-headed Mediterranean race is found in the same purity as in island Corsica and Sardinia.[797] Spain's short line of contact with France and its sharp separation by the unbroken wall of the Pyrenees robs the peninsula of any distinctly continental section, and consequently of any transitional area of race and culture; hence the unity of Spain as opposed to that twofold balanced diversity which we find in Italy and India. The Balkan Peninsula, on the other hand, owing to the great predominance of its continental section and the confused relief of the country, has not protected its distinctively peninsular or Greek section from the southward migrations of Slavs, Albanians, Wallachians, and other continental peoples.[798] It has been like a big funnel with a small mouth; the pressure from above has been very great. Hellas and even the Peloponnesus have had their peninsularity impaired and their race mixed, owing to the predominant continental section to the north.

[Sidenote: Peninsulas as intermediaries.]

Peninsulas, so far as they project from their continents, are areas of isolation; but so far as they extend also toward some land beyond, they become intermediaries. The isolating and intermediary aspects can be traced in the anthropo-geographical effects of every peninsula, even those which, like Brittany and Cornwall, project into the long uncharted waste of the Atlantic. In the order of historical development, a peninsula first isolates, until in its secluded environment it has molded a mature, independent people; then, as that people outgrows its narrow territory, the peninsula becomes a favorable base for maritime expansion to distant lands, or becomes a natural avenue for numerous reciprocal relations with neighboring lands beyond. Korea was the bridge for Mongolian migration from continental Asia to the Japan islands, and for the passage thither of Chinese culture, whether intellectual, esthetic, industrial or religious.[799] It has been the one country conspicuous in the foreign history of Japan. Conquered by the island empire in 1592, it paid tribute for nearly three centuries and yielded to its foreign master the southeastern port of Fusan, the Calais of Korea.[800] Since the treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 made it subject to Japan, it has become the avenue of Japanese expansion to the mainland and the unwilling recipient of the modern civilization thrust upon it by these English of the East. In like manner the Pyrenean peninsula has always been the intermediary between Europe and northwest Africa. Its population, as well as its flora and fauna, group with those of the southern continent. It has served as transit land between north and south for the Carthaginians, Vandals and Saracens; and in modern times it has maintained its character as a link by the Portuguese occupation of the Tangiers peninsula in the fifteenth century,[801] and the Spanish possession of Ceuta and various other points along the Moroccan coast from the year 709 A.D. to the present.[802]

[Sidenote: Peninsulas of intercontinental location.]

This role of intermediary is inevitably thrust upon all peninsulas which, like Spain, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Arabia, Farther India, Malacca, Chukchian Siberia, and Alaska, occupy an intercontinental location. Arabia especially in its climate, flora, races and history shows the haul and pull now of Asia, now of Africa. From it Asiatic influences have spread over Africa to Morocco and the Niger River on the west, and to Zanzibar on the south, permeated Abyssinia, and penetrated to the great Equatorial Lakes, whether in the form of that Mecca-born worship of Allah, or the creeping caravans and slave-gangs of Arab trader. Of all such intercontinental peninsulas, Florida alone seems to have had no role as an intermediary. Its native ethnic affinities were wholly with its own continent. It has given nothing to South America and received nothing thence. The northward expansion of Arawak and Carib tribes from Venezuela in historic times ceased at Cuba and Hayti. The Straits drew a dividing line. Local conditions in Florida itself probably furnish the explanation of this anomaly. Extensive swamps made the central and southern portion of the peninsula inhospitable to colonization from either direction, transformed it from a link into a barrier.

[Sidenote: Atlantic peninsulas of Europe]

Peninsulas which conspicuously lack an intercontinental location must long await their intermediary phase of development, but do not escape it. The Cornish, Breton and Iberian peninsulas were all prominent in the trans-Atlantic enterprises of Europe from the end of the fifteenth century. The first French sailors to reach the new world were Breton and Norman fishermen. Plymouth, as the chief port of the Cornish peninsula, figures prominently in the history of English exploration and settlement in America. It seems scarcely accidental that most of Queen Elizabeth's great sea captains were natives of this district—Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Sir Walter Raleigh, the latter holding the office of vice-admiral of Cornwall and Devon. It was the peninsula-like projection of South America about Cape St. Roque, twenty degrees farther east than Labrador, that welcomed the ships of Cabral and Americus Vespucius, and secured to Portugal a foothold in the Western Hemisphere.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XII

[747] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 336. London, 1896-1898.

[748] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, p. 41. Philadelphia, 1901.

[749] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 239-240. Philadelphia, 1901. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 336. London, 1896-1898.

[750] A.E. Wallace, Island Life, p. 14. New York, 1892.

[751] A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, p. 69, map. 1887.

[752] Ibid., pp. 78, 82, 90, 100.

[753] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. XII. New York, 1895. A.R. Wallace, Island Life, p. 6. New York, 1892.

[754] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Map on p. 43. New York, 1899.

[755] Ibid., pp. 39, 50, 80. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 100-110. London, 1896-1898.

[756] A.H. Keane, Ethnology, pp. 231-232, 362. Cambridge, 1896.

[757] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, p. 56, Vol. XIX of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1905.

[758] Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, p. 224. Boston, 1893.

[759] For various Asiatic and Oceanic elements, see Franz Boas, The Indians of British Columbia, Bull. of the Amer. Geog. Society Vol. 28, p. 229. The Northwest Coast Tribes, Science, Vol. XII, pp. 194-196. Niblack, The Indians of the Northwest Coast, p. 385, Washington. H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 177, 178, footnote; pp. 210, 225. San Francisco, 1886. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, map p. 42. New York, 1899.

[760] T.W. Higginson and William Macdonald, History of the United States, p. 21. New York and London, 1905.

[761] Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. II, pp. 64-68, 74-77, 305, 388-389. Oxford, 1899.

[762] Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, Vol. I, p. 60. Boston, 1889.

[763] Cited by E.J. Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. II, p. 292, footnote p. 294. Oxford, 1899.

[764] Waldemar Jochelson, The Mythology of the Koryak, The American Anthropologist, Vol. VI, pp. 415-416, 421-425. 1904.

[765] W.D. Dall, Masks, Labrets, and Certain Aboriginal Customs, Third Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 46-147. Washington, 1884.

[766] O.T. Mason, Migration and the Food Quest, pp. 275-292. Washington, 1894.

[767] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 51, 58-82. Philadelphia, 1905. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 5-7, 145-147, 153-154. London, 1896-1898.

[768] Ripley, Races of Europe, map p. 42, pp. 43-44. New York, 1899.

[769] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 7. London, 1896-1898.

[770] Tylor, Anthropology, pp. 86-87. New York, 1881.

[771] E.J. Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. II, pp. 554-555. Oxford, 1899.

[772] Justus Perthes, Taschen Atlas, p. 17. Gotha, 1905.

[773] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, pp. 188-212. Translated by W.L. Gage, Philadelphia, 1865. N.S. Shaler, Nature and Man in America, pp. 11-18, 151-165. New York, 1896.

[774] Strabo, Book II, chap. V. 26.

[775] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, p. 3, map. Philadelphia, 1905.

[776] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 248-249. Philadelphia, 1901.

[777] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 58, 103-104. Philadelphia, 1901. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, p. 86. Philadeladelphia, 1905 Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 5-7, 145-147, 153.

[778] Ibid., p. 293. E.J. Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. II, p. 315. Oxford, 1899.

[779] Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 412-417. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 72-75. Philadelphia, 1905.

[780] W.H. Dall, Masks, Labrets, and Certain Aboriginal Customs, Third Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 146-147. Washington, 1884.

[781] Cyrus Thomas, Report of Mound Explorations, pp. 522-523, 722-728. Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1894.

[782] E.J. Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. II, pp. 382-383. Oxford, 1899.

[783] N.S. Shaler, Nature and Man in America, pp. 151, 168-173. New York, 1891.

[784] Justus Perthes, Taschen Atlas, p. 9. Gotha, 1905.

[785] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, pp. 191-192. Translated by W. L. Gage, Philadelphia, 1865.

[786] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 247-258. New York, 1899.

[787] Ibid., pp. 403-409.

[788] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, Atlas, Maps, 34, 49. London, 1882.

[789] For race elements in Mesopotamia, see D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, Maps, pp. 173 and 176. London, 1903.

[790] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, pp. 201-202, 506-508, 535-536, 541. London, 1882.

[791] Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. I, pp. 293-297. Oxford, 1907.

[792] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, Ethnographical map, p. 201, pp. 202, 213-216. London, 1905. B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 111, 116, 119, 161. London, 1896.

[793] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 312-321. New York, 1899. E. Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 73, 83-84. New York, 1882.

[794] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, Ethnographic map, p. 184, and p. 306. London, 1904.

[795] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 22, 23, 150-151. New York, 1899.

[796] Ibid., pp. 248, 258, 272.

[797] Ibid., pp. 247, 273.

[798] Ibid., pp. 403-409, and map.

[799] F. Brinkley, Japan, Vol. I, pp. 38-42, 70, 75-80, 83-84, 126. Boston and Tokyo, 1901. W.E. Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Vol. I, pp. 73, 83. New York, 1903.