ying fragments of land, we often find islands facing two or
three ways, as it were, tenanted on different sides by different races,
and this regardless of the width of the intervening seas, where the
remote neighbors excel in nautical skill. Formosa is divided between its
wild Malay aborigines, found on the eastern, mountainous side of the
island, and Chinese settlers who cultivate the wide alluvial plain on
the western side.[855] Fukien Strait, though only eighty miles wide,
sufficed to bar Formosa to the land-loving northern Chinese till 1644,
when the island became an asylum for refugees from the Manchu invaders;
but long before, the wider stretches of sea to the south and north were
mere passways for the sea-faring Malays, who were the first to people
the island, and the Japanese who planted considerable colonies on its
northern coasts at the beginning of the fifteenth century. [See map page
103.]

In a similar way Madagascar is divided between the Malayan Hovas, who
occupy the eastern and central part of the island, and the African
Sakalavas who border the western coast. [See map page 105.] This
distribution of the ethnic elements corresponds to that of the insect
life, which is more African on the western side and more Indo-Malayan on
the eastern.[856] Though the population shows every physical type between
Negro and Malayan, and ethnic diversity still predominates over ethnic
unity in this vast island, nevertheless the close intercourse of an
island habitat has even in Madagascar produced unification of language.
Malayan speech of an ancient form prevails everywhere, and though
diversified into dialects, is everywhere so much alike that all
Malagasies can manage to understand one another.[857] The first
inhabitants were probably African; but the wide Mozambique Current (230
miles), with its strong southward flow, was a serious barrier to fresh
accessions from the mainland, especially as the nautical development of
the African tribes was always low. Meanwhile, however, successive relays
of sea-bred Malay-Polynesians crossed the broad stretch of the Indian
Ocean, occupied the island, and finally predominated over the original
Negro stock.[858] Then in historic times came Arabs, Swahilis, and East
Indians to infuse an Asiatic element into the population of the coasts,
while Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French set up short-lived colonies
on its shores. But despite this intermittent foreign immigration, the
fundame