ete, Sicily, Zealand, Gotland, St. Lawrence in Bering Sea.

(d) Island groups not to be considered apart from other groups.
Samoa, Fiji and Friendly Isles; Philippine, Sulu and Sunda Islands;
Greater and Lesser Antilles.

[Sidenote: Effect of size of land-masses.]

As the homes of man, these land-masses vary greatly owing to difference
of size. Only the six continents have been large enough to generate
great bodies of people, to produce differentiated branches of the human
family, and to maintain them in such numerical force that alien
intermixtures were powerless essentially to modify the gradually
developing ethnic type. The larger continents are marked by such
diversity of climate, relief and contour, that they have afforded the
varied environments and the area for the development of several great
types or sub-types of mankind. Australia has been just large enough to
produce one distinct native race, the result of a very ancient blend of
Papuan and Malayan stocks. But prevailing aridity has cast a mantle of
monotony over most of the continent, nullifying many local geographic
differences in highland and lowland, curtailing the available area of
its already restricted surface, and hence checking the differentiation
that results either from the competition of large numbers or from a
varied environment. We find Australia characterized above all other
continents by monotony of culture, mode of life, customs, languages, and
a uniform race type from the Murray River to York peninsula.[747] The twin
continents of the Americas developed a race singularly uniform in its
physical traits,[748] if we leave out of account the markedly divergent
Eskimos, but displaying a wide range of political, social and economic
developments, from the small, unorganized groups of wandering savages,
like the desert Shoshones and coast Fuegians, to the large, stable
empire of the Incas, with intensive agriculture, public works, a state
religion and an enlightened government.

Even the largest islands of the world, such as Borneo, New Guinea and
Madagascar, show no such independent ethnic development. This is the
distinguishing characteristic of the largest land-masses. Europe, except
on the basis of its size and peninsula form, has no title to the name of
continent; certainly not on anthropo-geographical grounds. Its
classification as a continent arose in the Mediterranean among the
Greeks, as a geographical expression of the antag