Such detached fragments or rather spores of settlement characterize all young geographical boundaries, where ethnic and political frontiers are still in the making.  The early French, English, Dutch, and Swedish settlements in America took the form of archipelagoes in a surrounding sea of Indian-owned forest land; and in 1800, beyond the frontier of continuous settlement in the United States long slender peninsulas and remote outlying islands of white occupation indicated American advance at the cost of the native.  Similarly the Portuguese, at the end of the sixteenth century, seized and fortified detached points along the coast of East Africa at Sofala, Malindi, Mombassa, Kilwa, Lamu, Zanzibar and Barava, which served as way stations for Portuguese ships bound for India, and were outposts of expansion from their Mocambique territory.[271] The snow-muffled forests of northern Siberia have their solitudes broken at wide intervals by Russian villages, located only along the streams for fishing, gold-washing and trading with the native.  These lonely clearings are outposts of the broad band of Muscovite settlement which stretches across southern Siberia from the Ural Mountains to the Angara River.[272] [See map page 103.]

[Sidenote:  Political islands of expansion.]

The most exaggerated example of scattered political location existing to-day is found in the bizarre arrangement of European holdings on the west coast of Africa between the Senegal and Congo rivers.  Here in each case a handful of governing whites is dropped down in the midst of a dark-skinned population in several districts along the coast.  The six detached seaboard colonies of the French run back in the interior into a common French-owned hinterland formed by the Sahara and western Sudan, which since 1894 link the Guinea Coast colonies with French Algeria and Tunis; but the various British holdings have no territorial cohesion at any point, nor have the Spanish or Portuguese or German.  The scattered location of these different European possessions is for the most part the expression of a young colonizing activity, developed in the past fifty years, and signalized by the vigorous intrusion of the French and Germans into the field.  To the anthropo-geographer the map of western Africa presents the picture of a political situation wholly immature, even embryonic.  The history of similar scattered outposts of political expansion in America, India and South Africa teaches us to look for extensive consolidation.

[Sidenote:  Ethnic islands of survival.]

Race islands occur also when a land is so inundated by a tide of invasion or continuous colonization that the original inhabitants survive only as detached remnants, where protecting natural conditions, such as forests, jungles, mountains or swamps, provide an asylum, or where a sterile soil or rugged plateau has failed to attract the cupidity of the conqueror.  The dismembered race, especially one in a lower status