s of a strange civilization, through
Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the
Peruvian coast. It is to be noted that these islands lie just outside
the westward-bearing Equatorial Current and trade-winds, on the margin
of the South Pacific anti-cyclonic winds and a southern current which
sets towards the Peruvian coast.[765] A more probable avenue for the
introduction of these Polynesian or Malayan elements of culture is found
in O.T. Mason's theory, that primitive mariners of the southwestern
Pacific, led into migration by the eternal food quest, may have skirted
the seaboard of East Asia and Northwest America, passing along a
great-circle route through the succession of marginal seas and
archipelagoes to various ports of entry on the Pacific front of America.
Such a route, favored by the prevailing marine currents and winds from
the southwest, and used repeatedly during long periods of time, might
have introduced trans-Pacific elements of race and culture into the
western side of America.[766]

[Sidenote: The real Orient of the World.]

Moreover, primitive America resembled Oceanica and northern Asia in its
ignorance of iron, in its Stone Age civilization, and its retarded
social and political development. Such affinities as it shows were
predominantly Pacific or trans-Pacific.[767] On its Atlantic side, it
stood out in striking contrast to the contemporaneous civilizations and
races in Europe and Africa; this was its unneighbored shore, lying on
the eastern margin of that broad zone of habitation which stretched
hence westward on and on around the world, to the outermost capes of
Europe and Africa. The Atlantic abyss formed the single gap in this
encircling belt of population, to which Columbus at last affixed the
clasp. The Atlantic face of the Americas formed therefore the drowsy
unstirred Orient of the inhabited world, which westward developed
growing activity--dreaming a civilization in Mexico and Peru, roused to
artistic and maritime achievement in Oceanica and the Malay Archipelago,
to permanent state-making and real cultural development in Asia, and
attaining the highest civilization at last in western Europe. There was
the sunset margin of the inhabited world, the area of achievement, the
adult Occident, facing across the dividing ocean that infant Orient
beyond. Here the Old World, the full-grown world, had accumulated in
Columbus' time the matured forces of a hemisphere; it w