merely contract but breaks up into
detached fragments. These isolated groups often give the impression of
being emigrants from the original home who, in some earlier period of
expansion, had occupied this outlying territory. At the dawn of western
European history, Gaul was the largest and most compact area of Celtic
speech. For this reason it has been regarded as the land whence sprang
the Celts of Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, the Alps and northern
Italy. Freeman thinks that the Gauls of the Danube and Po valleys were
detachments which had been left behind in the great Celtic migration
toward the west;[287] but does not consider the possibility of a once far
more extensive Celtic area, which, as a matter of fact, once reached
eastward to the Weser River and the Sudetes Mountains and was later
dismembered.[288] The islands of Celtic speech which now mark the western
flank of Great Britain and Ireland are shrunken fragments of a Celtic
linguistic area which, as place-names indicate, once comprised the whole
country.[289] Similarly, all over Russia Finnic place-names testify to
the former occupation of the country by a people now submerged by the
immigrant Slavs, except where they emerge in ethnic islands in the far
north and about the elbow of the Volga.[290] [See map page 225.] Beyond
the compact area of the Melanesian race occupying New Guinea and the
islands eastward to the Fiji and Loyalty groups, are found scattered
patches of negroid folk far to the westward, relegated to the interiors
of islands and peninsulas. The dispersed and fragmentary distribution of
this negroid stock has suggested that it formed the older and primitive
race of a wide region extending from India to Fiji and possibly even
beyond.[291]

[Sidenote: Contrast between ethnic islands of growth and decline.]

Ethnic or political islands of decline can be distinguished from islands
of expansion by various marks. When survivals of an inferior people,
they are generally characterized by inaccessible or unfavorable
geographic location. When remnants of former large colonial possessions
of modern civilized nations, they are characterized by good or even
excellent location, but lack a big compact territory nearby to which
they stand in the relation of outpost. Such are the Portuguese fragments
on the west coast of India at Goa, Damaon, and Diu Island, and the
Portuguese half of the island of Timor with the islet of Kambing in the
East Indies. Such a