Influences of Geographic Environment Part 44

[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, j.a.pan, 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.

[800] Henry Dyer, Dai Nippon, pp. 59, 69. New York, 1904.

[801] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 558. London, 1882.

[802] _Ibid._, pp. 559, 561. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, p. 248. New York, 1858.

CHAPTER XIII

ISLAND PEOPLES

[Sidenote: Physical relationship between islands and peninsulas.]

The characteristics which mark peninsulas, namely, ample contact with the sea, small area as compared with that of the continents, peripheral location, more or less complete isolation, combined, however, with the function of bridge or pa.s.sway to yet remoter lands, are all accentuated in islands. A list of the chief peninsulas of the world, as compared with the greatest islands, shows a far larger scale of areas for the former, even if the latter be made to include the vast ice-capped land-ma.s.s of Greenland (2,170,000 square kilometers or 846,000 square miles). New Guinea, the largest habitable island, has only one-fourth the area of Arabia, the largest of the peninsulas.[803] Therefore, both the advantages and disadvantages incident to a restricted area may be expected to appear in an intensified degree in islands.

Peninsulas are morphologically transition forms between mainland and islands; by slight geological changes one is converted into the other.

Great Britain was a peninsula at the end of the Tertiary period, before subsidence and the erosion of Dover Channel combined to sever it from the continent. It bears to-day in its flora and fauna the evidence of its former broad connection with the mainland.[804] In Pliocene times, Sicily and Sardinia were united by a land bridge with the Tunisian projection of North Africa; and they too, in their animal and plant life, reveal the old connection with the southern continent.[805]

Sometimes man himself for his own purposes converts a peninsula into an island. Often he constructs a ca.n.a.l, like that at Kiel or Corinth, to remove an isthmian obstruction to navigation; but occasionally he transforms his peninsula into an island for the sake of greater protection. William of Rubruquis tells us that in 1253 he found the neck of the Crimea cut through by a ditch from sea to sea by the native Comanians, who had taken refuge in the peninsula from the Tartar invaders, and in this way had sought to make their asylum more secure.[806]

The reverse process in nature is quite as common. The Shangtung Peninsula rises like a mountainous island from the sea-like level of alluvial plains about it, suggesting that remote time when the plains were not yet deposited and an arm of the Yellow Sea covered the s.p.a.ce between Shangtung and the highlands of Shansi.[807] The deposition of silt, aided often by slight local elevation of the coast, is constantly tying continental islands to the mainland. The Echinades Archipelago off the southwest coast of ancient Acarnania, opposite the mouth of the Achelous River, Strabo tells us, was formerly farther from sh.o.r.e than in his time, and was gradually being cemented to the mainland by Achelous silt. Some islets had already been absorbed in the advancing sh.o.r.eline, and the same fate awaited others.[808] Farther up this western coast of Greece, the island of Leukas has been converted into a peninsula by a sickle-shaped sandbar extending across the narrow channel.[809] Nature is working in its leisurely way to attach Sakhalin to the Siberian coast. The strong marine current which sets southward from the Okhotsk Sea through the Strait of Tartary carries silt from the mouth of the heavy laden Amur River, and deposits it in the "narrows" of the strait between Capes Luzarev and Pogobi, building up sandbars that come dangerously near the surface in mid channel.[810] Here the water is so shallow that occasionally after long prevailing winds, the ground is left exposed and the island natives can walk over to Asia.[811] The close proximity of Sakhalin to the mainland and the ice bridge covering the strait in winter rob the island of much of its insular character and caused it to pa.s.s as a peninsula until 1852. Yet that five-mile wide stretch of sea on its western coast determined its selection as the great penal station of the Russian Empire. The fact that peninsular India accords in so many points of flora, fauna and even primitive ethnic stock with Madagascar and South Africa, indicates its former island nature, which has been geographically cloaked by its union with the continent of Asia.

[Sidenote: Character of insular flora and fauna.]