he numerous minor conflicts that have occurred in Upper
Guinea between European commercial powers and the would-be trading
tribes of the bordering hinterland.

[Sidenote: Ethnic contrast between coast and interior peoples.]

A coast region is a peculiar habitat, inasmuch as it is more or less
dominated by the sea. It is exposed to inundation by tidal wave and to
occupation by immigrant fleets. It may be the base for out-going
maritime enterprise or the goal of some oversea movement, the dispenser
or the recipient of colonists. The contrast between coast-dwellers and
the nearby inland people which exists so widely can be traced not only
to a difference of environment, but often to a fundamental difference of
race or tribe caused by immigration to accessible shores. The Greeks,
crowded in their narrow peninsula of limited fertility, wove an Hellenic
border on the skirts of the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean lands,
just as the Carthaginians added a fringe of aliens to North Africa,
where the Punic people of the coast presented a marked contrast to the
Berbers of the interior. [See map page 251.]

An ethnographical map of Russia to-day shows a narrow but almost
continuous rim of Germans stretching from the River Niemen north through
the Baltic coast of Courland, Livland, and Esthland, as far as Revel;
and again, a similar band of Swedes along the seaboard of Finland, from
a point east of Helsingfors on the south around to Uleaborg on the
north,[483] dating from the time when Finland was a political dependency
of Sweden, and influenced by the fact that the frozen Gulf of Bothnia
every winter makes a bridge of ice between the two shores. [See map page
225.]

[Sidenote: Ethnic contrasts in the Pacific islands.]

Everywhere in the Melanesian archipelago, where Papuans and Malays dwell
side by side, the latter as the new-comers are always found in
possession of the coast, while the darker aborigines have withdrawn into
the interior. So in the Philippines, the aboriginal Negritos, pure or
more often mixed with Malayan blood, as in the Mangyan tribe of central
Mindoro, are found crowded back into the interior by the successive
invasions of Malays who have encircled the coasts. [See map page 147.]
The Zamboanga peninsula of Mindanao has an inland pagan population of
primitive Malayan race called Subanon, who have been displaced from the
littoral by the seafaring Samal Moros, Mohammedanized Malays from the
east shores of S