of Castile, far from the centers of population and culture in the river lowlands or along the coast.  It excluded the industrial and commercial development which was giving bone and sinew to the other European states.  The release of the national energies by the fall of Granada in 1492 and the now ingrained spirit of adventure enabled Spain and Portugal to utilize the unparalleled advantage of their geographical position at the junction of the Mediterranean and Atlantic highways, and by their great maritime explorations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to become foremost among European colonial powers.  But the development was sporadic, not supported by any widespread national movement.  In a few decades the maritime preeminence of the Iberian Peninsula began to yield to the competition of the Dutch and English, who were, so to speak, saturated with their own maritime environment.  Then followed the rapid decay of the sea power of Spain, followed by that of Portugal, till by 1648 even her coasting trade was in the hands of the Dutch, and Dutch vessels were employed to maintain communication with the West Indies.[30]

[Sidenote:  Sporadic response to a new environment.]

We have a later instance of sporadic development under the stimulus of new and favorable geographic conditions, a similar anti-climax.  The expansion of the Russians across the lowlands of Siberia was quite in harmony with the genius of that land-bred people; but when they reached Bering Sea, the enclosed basin, the proximity of the American continent, the island stepping-stones between, and the lure of rich sealskins to the fur-hunting Cossacks determined a sudden maritime expansion, for which the Russian people were unfitted.  Beginning in 1747, it swept the coast of Alaska, located its American administrative center first on Kadiak, then on Baranof Island, and by 1812 placed its southern outposts on the California coast near San Francisco Bay and on the Farralone Islands.[31] Russian convicts were employed to man the crazy boats built of green lumber on the shores of Bering Sea, and Aleutian hunters with their bidarkas were impressed to catch the seal.[32] The movement was productive only of countless shipwrecks, many seal skins, and an opportunity to satisfy an old grudge against England.  The territory gained was sold to the United States in 1867.  This is the one instance in Russian history of any attempt at maritime expansion, and also of any withdrawal from territory to which the Muscovite power had once established its claim.  This fact alone would indicate that only excessively tempting geographic conditions led the Russians into an economic and political venture which neither the previously developed aptitudes of the people nor the conditions of population and historical development on the Siberian seaboard were able to sustain.

[Sidenote:  The larger conception of the environment.]