Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

Easter Island, a speck in the vast Pacific, and more than half way between Asia and America, exhibited both inhabitants and ruins to its first discoverers.

Such is the horizontal distribution of Man; i.e. his distribution according to the degrees of latitude. What other animal has such a range? What species? What genus or order? Contrast with this the localized habitats of the Orang-utan, and the Chimpanzee as species; of the Apes as genera; of the Marsupialia as orders.

The vertical distribution is as wide. By vertical I mean elevation above the level of the sea. On the high table-land of Pamer we have the Kerghiz; summer visitants at least, where the Yak alone, among domesticated animals, lives and breathes in the rarefied atmosphere. The town of Quito is more than 10,000 feet above the sea; Walcheren is, perhaps, below the level of it.

Who expects uniformity of physiognomy or frame with such a distribution?

The size of ethnological areas.—Comparatively speaking, Europe is pretty equally divided amongst the European families. The Slavonic populations of Bohemia, Silesia, Poland, Servia, and Russia may, perhaps, have more than their due—still the French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Wallachians, all speaking languages of classical origin, have their share; and so has our own Germanic or Gothic family of English, Dutch, Frisians, Bavarians, and Scandinavians. Nevertheless, there are a few families as limited in geographical area as subordinate in political importance. There are the Escaldunac, or Basques,—originally the occupants of all Spain and half France, now pent up in a corner of the Pyrenees—the Welsh of the Iberic Peninsula. There are, also, the Skipetar, or Albanians; wedged in between Greece, Turkey, and Dalmatia. Nevertheless, the respective areas of the European families are pretty equally distributed; and the land of Europe is like a lottery wherein all the prizes are of an appreciable value.

The comparison with Asia verifies this. In immediate contact with the vast Turkish population centred in Independent Tartary, but spread over an area reaching, more or less continuously, from Africa to the Icy Sea (an area larger than the whole of Europe), come the tribes of Caucasus—Georgians, Circassians, Lesgians, Mizjeji, and Irôn; five well-defined groups, each falling into subordinate divisions, and some of them into subdivisions. The language of Constantinople is understood at the Lena. In the mountain range between the Caspian and the Black Sea, the mutually unintelligible languages are at least fifteen—perhaps more, certainly not fewer. Now, the extent of land covered by the Turk family shows the size to which an ethnological area may attain; whilst the multiplicity of mutually unintelligible tongues of Caucasus shows how closely families may be packed. Their geographical juxtaposition gives prominence to the contrast.

At the first view, this contrast seems remarkable. So far from being so, it is of continual occurrence. In China the language is one and indivisible: on its south-western frontier the tongues are counted by the dozen—just as if in Yorkshire there were but one provincial dialect throughout; two in Lincolnshire; and twenty in Rutland.

The same contrast re-appears in North America. In Canada and the Northern States the Algonkin area is measured by the degrees of latitude and longitude; in Louisiana and Alabama by the mile.

The same in South America. One tongue—the Guarani—covers half the continent. Elsewhere, a tenth part of it contains a score.

The same in Southern Africa. From the Line to the neighbourhood of the Cape all is Kaffre. Between the Gambia and the Gaboon there are more than twenty different divisions.