d, and southward,
conquering, absorbing, or pushing before them the aborigines into
what is now South and South-west China. These aboriginal races, who
represent a wave or waves of neolithic immigrants from Western Asia
earlier than the relatively high-headed immigrants into North China
(who arrived about the twenty-fifth or twenty-fourth century B.C.),
and who have left so deep an impress on the Japanese, mixed and
intermarried with the Chinese in the south, eventually producing the
pronounced differences, in physical, mental, and emotional traits,
in sentiments, ideas, languages, processes, and products, from the
Northern Chinese which are so conspicuous at the present day.

Inorganic Environment

At the beginning of their known history the country occupied by the
Chinese was the comparatively small region above mentioned. It was
then a tract of an irregular oblong shape, lying between latitude 34 deg.
and 40 deg. N. and longitude 107 deg. and 114 deg. E. This territory round the
elbow of the Yellow River had an area of about 50,000 square miles,
and was gradually extended to the sea-coast on the north-east as far as
longitude 119 deg., when its area was about doubled. It had a population of
perhaps a million, increasing with the expansion to two millions. This
may be called infant China. Its period (the Feudal Period) was in
the two thousand years between the twenty-fourth and third centuries
B.C. During the first centuries of the Monarchical Period, which lasted
from 221 B.C. to A.D. 1912, it had expanded to the south to such an
extent that it included all of the Eighteen Provinces constituting
what is known as China Proper of modern times, with the exception of
a portion of the west of Kansu and the greater portions of Ssuch'uan
and Yuennan. At the time of the Manchu conquest at the beginning of the
seventeenth century A.D. it embraced all the territory lying between
latitude 18 deg. and 40 deg. N. and longitude 98 deg. and 122 deg. E. (the Eighteen
Provinces or China Proper), with the addition of the vast outlying
territories of Manchuria, Mongolia, Ili, Koko-nor, Tibet, and Corea,
with suzerainty over Burma and Annam--an area of more than 5,000,000
square miles, including the 2,000,000 square miles covered by the
Eighteen Provinces. Generally, this territory is mountainous in the
west, sloping gradually down toward the sea on the east. It contains
three chief ranges of mountains and large alluvial plains in