o human enterprise. And below it occurs the grassland of
the pampas, only needing the horse to bring out the powers of its native
occupants.

Before leaving this subject of the domesticated horse, of which so
much use has already been made in order to illustrate how geographic
opportunity and human contrivance must help each other out, it is worth
noticing how an invention can quickly revolutionize even that cultural
life of the ruder races which is usually supposed to be quite hide-bound
by immemorial custom. When the Europeans first broke in upon the
redskins of North America, they found them a people of hunters and
fishers, it is true, but with agriculture as a second string everywhere
east of the Mississippi as well as to the south, and on the whole
sedentary, with villages scattered far apart; so that in pre-Conquest
days they would seem to have been enjoying a large measure of security
and peace. The coming of the whites soon crowded them back upon
themselves, disarranging the old boundaries. At the same time the horse
and the gun were introduced. With extraordinary rapidity the Indian
adapted himself to a new mode of existence, a grassland life,
complicated by the fact that the relentless pressure of the invaders
gave it a predatory turn which it might otherwise have lacked.
Something very similar, though neither conditions nor consequences
were quite the same, occurred in the pampas of South America, where
horse-Indians like the Patagonians, who seem at first sight the
indigenous outcrop of the very soil, are really the recent by-product
of an intrusive culture.

* * * * *

And now let us hark back to southern Asia with its two reservoirs of
life, India and China, and between them a jutting promontory pointing
the way to the Indonesian archipelago, and thence onward farther still
to the wide-flung Austral region with its myriad lands ranging in size
from a continent to a coral-atoll. Here we have a nursery of seamen
on a vaster scale than in the Mediterranean; for remember that from
this point man spread, by way of the sea, from Easter Island in the
Eastern Pacific right away to Madagascar, where we find Javanese
immigrants, and negroes who are probably Papuan, whilst the language
is of a Malayo-Polynesian type.

India and China each well-nigh deserve the status of geographical
provinces on their own account. Each is an area of settlement; and,
once there is settlement, there