[Illustration:  DISTRIBUTION OF SETTLEMENT IN THE NORWEGIAN PROVINCE OF FINMARKEN.]

[Sidenote:  Island way station on maritime routes.]

Not unlike this serial grouping of oasis states along caravan routes through the desert are the island way stations that rise out of the waste of the sea and are connected by the great maritime routes of trade.  Such are the Portuguese Madeiras, Bissagos, and San Thome on the line between Lisbon and Portuguese Loanda in West Africa; and their other series of the Madeiras, Cape Verde, and Fernando, which facilitated communication with Pernambuco when Brazil was a Portuguese colony.  The classic example of this serial grouping is found in the line of islands, physical or political, which trace England’s artery of communication with India—­Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Perim, Aden, Sokotra, and Ceylon, besides her dominant position at Suez.

[Sidenote:  Scattered location of primitive tribes.]

Quite different from this scattered distribution, due to physical conditions, in an otherwise uninhabited waste is that wide dispersal of a people in small detached groups which is the rule in lower stages of culture, and which bespeaks the necessity of relatively large territorial reserves for the uneconomic method of land utilization characteristic of hunting, fishing, pastoral nomadism, and primitive agriculture.  A distribution which claims large areas, without, however, maintaining exclusive possession or complete occupation, indicates among advanced peoples an unfinished process,[262] especially unfinished expansion, such as marked the early French and English colonies in America and the recent Russian occupation of Siberia.  Among primitive peoples it is the normal condition, belongs to the stage of civilization, not to any one land or any one race, though it has been called the American form of distribution.

Not only are villages and encampments widely dispersed, but also the tribal territories.  The Tupis were found by the Portuguese explorers along the coast of eastern Brazil and in the interior from the mouth of the La Plata to the lower Amazon, while two distant tribes of the Tupis were dropped down amid a prevailing Arawak population far away among the foothills of the Andes in two separate localities on the western Amazon.[263] [See map page 101.] The Athapascans, from their great compact northern area between Hudson Bay, the Saskatchewan River, and the Eskimo shores of the Arctic Ocean sent southward a detached offshoot comprising the Navajos, Apaches and Lipans, who were found along the Rio Grande from its source almost to its mouth; and several smaller fragments westward who were scattered along the Pacific seaboard from Puget Sound to northern California.[264] The Cherokees of the southern Appalachians and the Tuscaroras of eastern North Carolina were detached groups of the Iroquois, who had their chief seat about the lower Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence.  Virginia