What is true of states is true also of peoples.  The extinction of the retarded “provisional peoples” of the earth progresses more rapidly in small groups than in large, and in small islands more quickly than in continental areas.  Of the twenty-one Indian stocks or families which have died out in the United States, fifteen belonged to the small bands once found in the Pacific coast states, and four more were similar fragments found on the lower Mississippi and its bayous.[305] [See map page 54.] The native Gaunches of Teneriffe Island disappeared long ago.  The last Tasmanian died in 1876.  New Zealand, whose area is four times that of Tasmania, and therefore gives some respite before the encroachments of the whites, still harbors 47,835 Maoris, or little over one-third the native population of the island in 1840.[306] But these compete for the land with nearly one million English colonists, and in the limited area of the islands they will eventually find no place of retreat before the relentless white advance.

To the Australians, on the other hand, much inferior to the Maoris, the larger area of their continent affords extensive deserts and steppes into which the natives have withdrawn and whither the whites do not care to follow.  Hence mere area, robbed of every other favorable geographical circumstance, has contributed to the survival of the 230,000 natives in Australia.  Similarly the Arawaks were early wiped out on the island of Cuba and the Caribs on San Domingo and the smaller Antilles by the truculent methods of the Spanish conquerors, while both stocks survive on the continent of South America.  Even the truculent methods of the Spanish conquerors could make little impression upon the relatively massive populations of Mexico and Peru, whose survival and latter-day recovery of independence can be ascribed largely though not solely to their ample territorial base.  So the vast area of the United States and Canada has afforded a hinterland of asylum to the retreating Indians, whose moribund condition, especially in the United States, is betrayed by their scattered distribution in small, unfavorable localities.  On the other hand, the vast extent of Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada, combined with the adverse climatic conditions of the region, will guarantee the northern Indians a longer survival.  In Tierra del Fuego, the encroachments of sheep-farmers and gold-miners from Patagonia twenty years ago, by fencing off the land and killing off the wild guanaco, threatened the existence of this animal and of the Onas natives of the island.  These, soon brought to bay in that natural enclosure, attacked the farmers, whose reprisals between 1890 and 1900 reduced the number of the Onas from 2,000 to 800 souls.[307]

[Sidenote:  Contrast of large and small areas in bio-geography.]