raphical boundaries, where ethnic and political frontiers are
still in the making. The early French, English, Dutch, and Swedish
settlements in America took the form of archipelagoes in a surrounding
sea of Indian-owned forest land; and in 1800, beyond the frontier of
continuous settlement in the United States long slender peninsulas and
remote outlying islands of white occupation indicated American advance
at the cost of the native. Similarly the Portuguese, at the end of the
sixteenth century, seized and fortified detached points along the coast
of East Africa at Sofala, Malindi, Mombassa, Kilwa, Lamu, Zanzibar and
Barava, which served as way stations for Portuguese ships bound for
India, and were outposts of expansion from their Mocambique
territory.[271] The snow-muffled forests of northern Siberia have their
solitudes broken at wide intervals by Russian villages, located only
along the streams for fishing, gold-washing and trading with the native.
These lonely clearings are outposts of the broad band of Muscovite
settlement which stretches across southern Siberia from the Ural
Mountains to the Angara River.[272] [See map page 103.]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Ethnic islands of surv