ly called into question,
these peoples have undoubtedly been subjected to Asiatic influences.
The same thing is true of the native American race, both as to Asiatic
origin and influences; because the approximation of Siberia to Alaska is
too close to exclude human relations between the two continents. The
Malays, too, were probably sprung from the soil of southeastern Asia and
spread thence over their close-packed Archipelago. Even the native
Australians betray a Malayan and therefore Asiatic element in their
composition,[749] while the same element can be traced yet more distinctly
in the widely scattered Polynesians and the Hovas of Madagascar. This
radiation of races seems to reflect Asia's location at the core of the
land-masses. Yet the capacity to form such centers of ethnic
distribution is not necessarily limited to the largest continents;
history teaches us that small areas which have early achieved a
relatively dense population are prone to scatter far their seeds of
nations.

[Sidenote: Location of hemispheres and ethnic kinship.]

The continents harbor the most widely different races where they are
farthest apart; where they converge most nearly, they show the closest
ethnic kinships. The same principle becomes apparent in their plants and
animals. The distribution of the land-masses over the earth is
conspicuous for their convergence in the north and divergence in long
peninsular forms toward the south. The contrasted grouping is reflected
in both, the lower animals and the peoples inhabiting these respectively
vicinal and remote lands. Only where North America and Eurasia stretch
out arms to one another around the polar sea do Eastern and Western
Hemisphere show a community of mammalian forms. These are all strictly
Arctic animals, such as the reindeer, elk, Arctic fox, glutton and
ermine.[750] This is the Boreal sub-region of the Holoarctic zoological
realm, characterized by a very homogeneous and very limited fauna.[751] In
contrast, the portion of the hemispheres lying south of the Tropic of
Cancer is divided into four distinct zoological realms, corresponding to
Central and South America, Africa south of Sahara, the two Indian
peninsulas with the adjacent islands, and Australia.[752] But when we
consider the continental extremities projecting beyond the Tropic of
Capricorn, where geographic divergence reaches a climax, we find their
faunas and floras utterly dissimilar, despite the fact that climate an