HOW THE EARTH WAS PEOPLED. 675 



ignorant. It was then that, weak and almost naked, having only just 

 got fire and a few rude arms with which to defend itself and procure 

 food, the human race conquered the world and spread itself from 

 within the Arctic Circle to Terra del Fuego, from the Samoyed country 

 to Van Diemen's Land, from the North Cape to the Cape of Good Hope. 

 It is this primitive exodus, as certain as it is inconceivable, accepted 

 by science as well as by dogma, that we have to explain, or at least to 

 make probable ; and that in an age when it is only after the most 

 wonderful discoveries, by the aid of the most powerful machinery for 

 navigation, through the boldest and most adventurous enterprises, that 

 civilized man has been able to flatter himself that he has at last gone 

 as far as infant man went in an age that is so far removed from us as 

 to baffle all calculations. 



We must insist on this point, for it brings into light an obstacle 

 which those who have tried to trace out the connection between widely 

 separated races and to determine the course that had been followed by 

 tribes now separated by oceans and vast expanses have hitherto found 

 insurmountable ; for, if man is one to which we are ready to agree 

 we must assign a single point of departure for his migrations. In 

 these migrations, man has gone wherever he could, and, at every spot 

 he has occupied and settled, has acquired characteristics peculiar to 

 the place, and which differentiated him from the men settling in other 

 places. Hence the varieties in human races. Some of these spots 

 seem to have been peculiarly favorable to his advancement, and be- 

 came centers of civilization. The number of such centers is, however, 

 very limited, and their distribution is significant. 



The continental masses are distributed in three principal groups, 

 one feature in the configuration of which must strike every one who 

 carefully examines a map of the world. It will be noticed that they 

 are so expanded toward the north as to touch in that direction or 

 be separated only by narrow passages, and that they also surround 

 within the Arctic Circle a central polar sea with a bordering island-belt. 

 Going down toward the south we find that the three continents, North 

 America, Europe, and Northern Asia, which had approached each 

 other so closely, give place to three appendages, South America, Af- 

 rica, and Australia, which in their turn gradually taper off to mere 

 points in an illimitable sea, long before they reach the Antarctic Circle. 

 Within this circle the configuration of the land is precisely the reverse 

 of that in the north ; it is that of a solid cap of land around the pole, 

 in the midst of the great ocean. 



If we again observe these masses, we shall find that civilization 

 was born in each of them under similar geographical conditions, viz., 

 in the neighborhood of a smaller interior sea, near or rather north of 

 the tropic of Cancer, between 20 and 35 north latitude. The most 

 eastern of the centers is in China, near the Japan Sea. The most 

 western, and apparently the most recent, was along the inner shores 



