26 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



contrast to that obtaining upon the eastern and 

 northern shores of the Arabian Sea, with its great 

 inlets of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. There the 

 sea, being unaided by shoreward winds, has had little 

 influence upon the land, and in consequence Somali- 

 land, the Eastern Sudan, Arabia, and Baluchistan are 

 sparsely populated, and their inhabitant races inured 

 to the utmost privations that an arid country, serrated 

 with huge mountains and subject to the fiercest rays 

 of the sun, can inflict upon them. True, there are 

 occasionally to be found delightful oases, that by 

 some happy combination of climatic circumstances are 

 beautiful and fertile beyond description, as in parts of 

 Persia, and what we have been led to believe was the 

 first home of mankind. But there, again, judging 

 from the mighty ruins that have been discovered by 

 explorers in the midst of awful deserts, peopled only 

 by a few wretched nomads, we are also driven to 

 the belief that vast changes of climate must have 

 occurred to reduce these regions to their present 

 desolate condition. Nothing else surely could have 

 depopulated them and made them so barren as they 

 now undoubtedly are. 



India, however, in spite of its many centuries of 

 devastating warfare, of the utmost efforts of man to 

 render of no avail the bountiful gifts of Nature, still 

 remains a land of teeming populations, a soil that is 

 annually receiving from the sea the prime necessities 

 of life for both animal and vegetable is probably 

 wealthier now than in any former part of its history. 

 Even the habits of the people, who with a dull passive 

 ignorance resist all the efforts of Western science 

 to teach them the elementary laws of health, are 



