f the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi and
the alluring fur trade tempted them to an expansion that was their
political and economic undoing. Russia's history illustrates the curse
of a distant horizon. On the other hand, out of a restricted
geographical base, with its power to concentrate and intensify the
national forces, grew Rome and Greece, England and Japan, ancient Peru
and the Thirteen Colonies of America.

[Sidenote: Vicinal location.]

If even the most detached and isolated of these natural locations be
examined, its people will, nevertheless, reveal a transitional
character, intermediate between those of its neighbors, because from
these it has borrowed both ethnic stock and culture, Great Britain is an
island, but its vicinal location groups it with the North Sea family of
people. Even in historic times it has derived ancient Belgian stock,
Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Scandinavian from the long semi-circle of
nearby continental lands, which have likewise contributed so much to the
civilization of the island. Similarly, Japan traces the sources of its
population to the north of Asia by way of the island of Sakhalin, to the
west through Korea, and to the Malay district of the south, whence the
Kuro Siwa has swept stragglers to the shores of Kiu-siu. Like England,
Japan also has drawn its civilization from its neighbors, and then,
under the isolating influence of its local environment, has
individualized both race and culture. Here we have the interplay of the
forces of natural and vicinal location.

A people situated between two other peoples form an ethnic and cultural
link between the two. The transitional type is as familiar in
anthropo-geography as in biology. The only exception is found in the
young intrusion of a migrating or conquering people, like that of the
Hungarians and Turks in southeastern Europe, and of the Berger Tuaregs
and Fulbes among the negroes of western Sudan; or of a colonizing
people, like that of the Russians in Mongolian Siberia and of Europeans
among the aborigines of South Africa. Even in these instances race
amalgamation tends to take place along the frontiers, as was the case in
Latin America and as occurs to-day in Alaska and northern Canada, where
the "squaw man" is no rarity. The assimilation of culture, at least in a
superficial sense, may be yet more rapid, especially where hard climatic
conditions force the interloper to imitate the life of the native. The
industrial