the Indians from their hunting grounds in forest and
prairie was the beginning of their decay. Bolivia maimed herself for all
time when in 1884 she relinquished to Chile her one hundred and eighty
miles of coast between the Rio Lao and the twenty-fourth parallel. Her
repeated efforts later to recover at least one seaport on the Pacific
indicate her own estimate of the loss by which she was limited to an
inland location, and deprived of her maritime periphery.[286]

[Sidenote: Interpretation of scattered and marginal location.]

The habits of a people and the consequent demands which they make upon
their environment must be taken into account in judging whether or not a
restricted geographical location is indicative of a retrograde process.
The narrow marginal distribution of the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshean
Indians on the islands and coastal strips of northwestern America means
simply the selection of sites most congenial to those inveterate fisher
tribes. The fact that the English in the vicinity of the Newfoundland
Banks settled on a narrow rim of coast in order to exploit the
fisheries, while the French peasants penetrated into the interior
forests and farmlands of Canada, was no sign of territorial decline.
English and French were both on the forward march, each in their own
way. The scattered peripheral location of the Phoenician trading
stations and later of the Greek colonies on the shores of the
Mediterranean was the expression of the trading and maritime activity of
those two peoples. Centuries later a similar distribution of Arab posts
along the coast of East Africa, Madagascar and the western islands of
the Sunda Archipelago indicated the great commercial expansion of the
Mohammedan traders of Oman and Yemen. The lack came when this
distribution, normal as a preliminary form, bore no fruit in the
occupation of wide territorial bases. [See map page 251.]

[Sidenote: Prevalence of ethnic islands of decline.]

In general, however, any piecemeal or marginal location of a people
justifies the question as to whether it results from encroachment,
dismemberment, and consequently national or racial decline. This
inference as a rule strikes the truth. The abundance of such ethnic
islands and reefs--some scarcely distinguishable above the flood of the
surrounding population--is due to the fact that when the area of
distribution of any life form, whether racial or merely animal, is for
any cause reduced, it does not