s in to arrest the national development, which then fades
and decays. To this rule Great Britain and Japan are notable exceptions,
owing partly to the unusual size of their insular territory, partly to a
highly advantageous location. Minoan Crete, in that gray antiquity when
Homeric history was still unborn, gave out of its abundance in art,
government, laws and maritime knowledge to the eastern Mediterranean
world, till the springs of inspiration in its own small land were
exhausted, and its small population was unable to resist the flood of
northern invasion. Then the dispenser of gifts had to become an
alms-taker from the younger, larger, more resourceful Hellenic world.

The same story of early but short lived preeminence comes from other
Aegean islands. Before the rise of Athens, Samos under the great despot
Polykrates became "the first of all cities, Hellenic or barbaric," a
center of Ionian manners, luxury, art, science and culture, the seat of
the first great thalassocracy or sea-power after that of Cretan Minos, a
distributing point for commerce and colonies.[832] Much the same history
and distinction attached to the island of Rhodes long before the first
Olympiad,[833] and to the little island of Aegina.[834] If we turn to the
native races of America, we find that the Haida Indians of the Queen
Charlotte Archipelago are markedly superior to their Tlingit and
Tsimshean kinsmen of the nearby Alaskan and British Columbian coast. In
their many and varied arts they have freely borrowed from their
neighbors; but they have developed these loans with such marvelous skill
and independence that they greatly surpass their early masters, and are
accredited with possessing the creative genius of all this coast.[835]
Far away, on the remote southeastern outskirts of the island world of
the Pacific, a parallel is presented by little Easter Isle. Once it was
densely populated and completely tilled by a people who had achieved
singular progress in agriculture, religion, masonry, sculpture in stone
and wood carving, even with obsidian tools, and who alone of all the
Polynesians had devised a form of hieroglyphical writing.[836] Easter
Isle to-day shows only abandoned fields, the silent monuments of its huge
stone idols, and the shrunken remnant of a deteriorated people.[837]

[Sidenote: Sources of ethnic stock of islands.]

Isolation and accessibility are recorded in the ethnic stock of every
island. Like its flora and fauna,