Political islands of expansion.
The most exaggerated example of scattered political location existing to-day is found in the bizarre arrangement of European holdings on the west coast of Africa between the Senegal and Congo rivers. Here in each case a handful of governing whites is dropped down in the midst of a dark-skinned population in several districts along the coast. The six detached seaboard colonies of the French run back in the interior into a common French-owned hinterland formed by the Sahara and western Sudan, which since 1894 link the Guinea Coast colonies with French Algeria and Tunis; but the various British holdings have no territorial cohesion at any point, nor have the Spanish or Portuguese or German. The scattered location of these different European possessions is for the most part the expression of a young colonizing activity, developed in the past fifty years, and signalized by the vigorous intrusion of the French and Germans into the field. To the anthropo-geographer the map of western Africa presents the picture of a political situation wholly immature, even embryonic. The history of similar scattered outposts of political expansion in America, India and South Africa teaches us to look for extensive consolidation.
Ethnic islands of survival.
Race islands occur also when a land is so inundated by a tide of invasion or continuous colonization that the original inhabitants survive only as detached remnants, where protecting natural conditions, such as forests, jungles, mountains or swamps, provide an asylum, or where a sterile soil or rugged plateau has failed to attract the cupidity of the conqueror. The dismembered race, especially one in a lower status of civilization, can be recognized as such islands of survival by their divided distribution in less favored localities, into which they have fled, and in which seldom can they increase and recombine to recover their lost heritage. In Central Africa, between the watersheds of the Nile, Congo and Zambesi, there is scarcely a large native state that does not shelter in its forests scattered groups of dwarf hunter folk variously known as Watwa, Batwa, and Akka.[273] They serve the agricultural tribes as auxiliaries in war, and trade with them in meat and ivory, but also rob their banana groves and manioc patches. The local dispersion of these pygmies in small isolated groups among stronger peoples points to them as survivals of a once wide-spread aboriginal race, another branch of which, as Schweinfurth suggested, is probably found in the dwarfed Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa.[274] [See map page 105.]
Similar in distribution and in mode of life are the aborigines of the Philippines, the dwarf Negritos, who are still found inhabiting the forests in various localities. They are dispersed through eight provinces of Luzon and in several other islands, generally in the interior, whither they have been driven by the invading Malays.[275] [See map page 147.] But the Negritos crop out again in the mountain interior of Formosa and Borneo, in the eastern peninsula of Celebes, and in various islands of the Malay Archipelago as far east as Ceram and Flores, amid a prevailing Malay stock. Toward the west they come to the surface in the central highland of Malacca, in the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, and in several mountain and jungle districts of India. Here again is the typical geographic distribution of a moribund aboriginal race, whose shrivelled patches merely dot the surface of their once wide territory.[276] The aboriginal Kolarian tribes of India are found under the names of Bhils, Kols and Santals scattered about in the fastnesses of the Central Indian jungles, the Vindhyan Range, and in the Rajputana Desert, within the area covered by Indo-Aryan occupation.[277] [See map page 103.]
Discontinuous distribution.
Such broad, intermittent dispersal is the anthropological prototype of the "discontinuous distribution" of biologists. By this they mean that certain types of plants and animals occur in widely separated regions, without the presence of any living representatives in the intermediate area. But they point to the rock records to show that the type once occupied the whole territory, till extensive elimination occurred, owing to changes in climatic or geologic conditions or to sharpened competition in the struggle for existence, with the result that the type survived only in detached localities offering a favorable environment.[278] In animal and plant life, the ice invasion of the Glacial Age explains most of these islands of survival; in human life, the invasion of stronger peoples. The Finnish race, which in the ninth century covered nearly a third of European Russia, has been shattered by the blows of Slav expansion into numerous fragments which lie scattered about within the old ethnic boundary from the Arctic Ocean to the Don-Volga watershed.[279] The encroachments of the whites upon the red men of America early resulted in their geographical dispersion. The map showing the distribution of population in 1830 reveals large detached areas of Indian occupancy embedded in the prevailing white territory.[280] The rapid compression of the tribal lands and the introduction of the reservation system resulted in the present arrangement of yet smaller and more widely scattered groups. Such islands of survival tend constantly to contract and diminish in number with the growing progress, density, and land hunger of the surrounding race. The Kaffir islands and the Hottentot "locations" in South Africa, large as they now are, will repeat the history of the American Indian lands, a history of gradual shrinkage and disappearance as territorial entities.