rise to the
anthropo-geographical phenomenon of scattered location. Districts of
intense cold, which sustain life only in contact with marine supplies of
food, necessitate an intermittent distribution along the seaboard, with
long, unoccupied stretches between. This is the location we are familiar
with among the Eskimo of Greenland and Alaska, among the Norse and Lapps
in the rugged Norwegian province of Finmarken, where over two-thirds of
the population live by fishing. In the interior districts of this
province about Karasjok and Kantokeino, the reindeer Lapps show a
corresponding scattered grouping here and there on the inhospitable
slopes of the mountains.[260] In that one-half of Switzerland lying above
the altitude where agriculture is possible, population is sprinkled at
wide intervals over the sterile surface of the highlands.

A somewhat similar scattered location is found in arid deserts, where
population is restricted to the oases dropped here and there at wide
intervals amid the waste of sand. But unlike those fragments of human
life on the frozen outskirts of the habitable world, the oasis states
usually constitute links in a chain of connection across the desert
between the fertile lands on either side, and therefore form part of a
series, in which the members maintain firm and necessary economic
relations. Every caravan route across the Sahara is dotted by a series
of larger or smaller tribal settlements. Tripoli, Sokna, Murzuk, Bilma
and Bornu form one such chain; Algiers, El Golea, Twat, the salt mines
of Taudeni, Arawan and Timbuctoo, another. Bagdad, Hayil, Boreyda and
Mecca trace the road of pilgrim and merchant starting from the Moslem
land of the Euphrates to the shrine of Mohammed.[261]

[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF SETTLEMENT IN THE NORWEGIAN PROVINCE OF
FINMARKEN.]

[Sidenote: Island way station on maritime routes.]

Not unlike this serial grouping of oasis states along caravan routes
through the desert are the island way stations that rise out of the
waste of the sea and are connected by the great maritime routes of
trade. Such are the Portuguese Madeiras, Bissagos, and San Thome on the
line between Lisbon and Portuguese Loanda in West Africa; and their
other series of the Madeiras, Cape Verde, and Fernando, which
facilitated communication with Pernambuco when Brazil was a Portuguese
colony. The classic example of this serial grouping is found in the line
of islands, physical or political