he progress of a particular
people may often be traced in part to its physical environment;
especially to changes of environment, by migration, for instance.
Further, it is not for a moment suggested that a race never evolves its
own culture, but has always to receive it from another. If we said that,
we should be ultimately driven to recognise culture, like the early
Chinese, as a gift of the gods. What is meant is that the chief key to
the progress of certain peoples, the arrest of progress in others,
and the entire absence of progress in others, is the study of their
relations with, or isolation from, other peoples. They make progress
chiefly according to the amount of stimulation they get by contact with
a diverse culture.

Let us see if this furnishes a broad explanation of the position of the
various peoples of the world. The Ethnologist tells us that the
lowest peoples of the earth are the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, the
Hottentots, a number of little-understood peoples in Central Africa,
the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, the (extinct) Tasmanians, the Aetas in the
interior of the Philippines, and certain fragments of peoples on islands
of the Indian Ocean. There is not the least trace of a common element
in the environment of these peoples to explain why they have remained
at the level of primitive humanity. Many of them lived in the most
promising and resourceful surroundings. What is common to them all is
their isolation from the paths of later humanity. They represent the
first wave of human distribution, pressed to the tips of continents or
on islands by later waves, and isolated. The position of the Veddahs
is, to some extent, an exception; and it is interesting to find that the
latest German students of that curious people think that they have been
classed too low by earlier investigators.

We cannot run over all the peoples of the earth in this way, but will
briefly glance at the lower races of the various continents. A branch
of the second phase of developing humanity, the negroid stock, spread
eastward over the Asiatic islands and Australia, and westward into
Africa. The extreme wing of this army, the Australian blacks, too
clearly illustrates the principle to need further reference. It has
retained for ages the culture of the middle Palaeolithic. The negritos
who penetrated to the Philippines are another extreme instance of
isolation. The Melanesians of the islands of the Indian and Pacific
Ocean are less