as searching for
some outlet across the shoreless distances of the Atlantic, waiting for
some call from its voiceless beyond.

[Sidenote: The Atlantic abyss in historic movements of peoples.]

This deep, unbridged chasm of the Atlantic, closed only four hundred
years ago, must be taken into account in all investigations of the
geographical distribution of races, whether in prehistoric or historic
times. The influences of those ages when it formed an impassable gulf
are still operative in directing the movements of the peoples to-day
inhabiting its shores, because that barrier maintained the continents of
America as a vast territorial reserve, sparsely inhabited by a Stone Age
people, and affording a fresh field for the superior, accumulated
energies of Europe.

[Sidenote: Races and continents.]

Australia and the double continent of America show each the coincidence
of an ethnic realm with an isolated continent. In contrast, when we come
to the Old World triad of Europe, Asia and Africa, we find three races,
to be sure, but races whose geographical distribution ignores the
boundaries of the continents. The White race belongs to all three, and
from time immemorial has made the central basin of the Mediterranean the
white man's sea. The Mongolian, though primarily at home in Asia,
stretches along the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic shores of
Norway, and in historical times has penetrated up the Danube to the foot
of the Alps. Nor was the Negroid stock confined to Africa, though Africa
has always been its geographical core. The Indian Peninsula and Malay
Archipelago, once peopled by a primitive Negroid race, but now harboring
only remnants of them in the Deccan, Malacca, the Philippines and
elsewhere, bridge the distance to the other great Negroid center in
Melanesia and the derivative or secondary Negroid area of
Australia.[768] The Negroid race belongs essentially to the long southern
land pendants of the Eastern Hemisphere; and wherever it has bordered on
the lighter northern stocks, it has drawn a typical boundary zone of
mingled tints which never diverges far from the Equator, from the
Atlantic shores of the Sudan to Pacific Fiji.[769] [See map page 105.]

The effort of the old ethnology, as represented by Blumenbach, to make a
five-fold division of the races in agreement with the five continents
was a mistake. To distinguish between the continents is one thing and to
distinguish between the races is an