significance, except that stretch opposite the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, which Arab merchants in the tenth century appropriated as the basis for their slave and ivory trade.  The East Indies and Ceylon have been so many offshore stations whence, first through the Portuguese, and later through the Dutch and English, European influences percolated into southeastern Asia.  Asia, with its island-strewn shores, has diffused its influences over a broad zone of the western Pacific, and through the agency of its active restless Malays, even halfway across that ocean.  In contrast, the western coast of the Americas, a stretch nearly 10,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutian chain, has seen its aboriginal inhabitants barred from seaward expansion by the lack of offshore islands, and its entrance upon the historical stage delayed till recent times.

In general it can be said that islandless seas attain a later historical development than those whose expanse is rendered less forbidding by hospitable fragments of land.  This factor, as well as its location remote from the old and stimulating civilization of Syria and Asia Minor, operated to retard the development of the western Mediterranean long after the eastern basin had reached its zenith.

[Sidenote:  Previous habitat of coast-dwellers.]

Coast-dwelling peoples exhibit every degree of intimacy with the water, from the amphibian life of many Malay tribes who love the wash of the waves beneath their pile-built villages, to the Nama Bushmen who inhabit the dune-walled coast of Southwest Africa, and know nothing of the sea.  In the resulting nautical development the natural talents and habits of the people are of immense influence; but these in turn have been largely determined by the geographical environment of their previous habitat, whether inland or coastal, and by the duration in time, as well as the degree and necessity, of their contact with the sea.  The Phoenicians, who, according to their traditions as variously interpreted, came to the coast of Lebanon either from the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea,[460] brought to their favorable maritime location a different endowment from that of the land-trading Philistines, who moved up from the south to occupy the sand-choked shores of Palestine,[461] or from that of the Jews, bred to the grasslands of Mesopotamia and the gardens of Judea, who only at rare periods in their history forced their way to the sea.[462] The unindented coast stretching from Cape Carmel south to the Nile delta never produced a maritime people and never achieved maritime importance, till a race of experienced mariners like the Greeks planted their colonies and built their harbor moles on the shores of Sharon and Philistia.[463] So on the west face of Africa, from the Senegal southward along the whole Guinea Coast to Benguela, all evidences of kinship and tradition among the local tribes point to an origin on the interior plains and a recent migration seaward,[464] so that no previous schooling enabled them to exploit the numerous harbors along this littoral, as did later the sea-bred Portuguese and English.