come as near meeting ethnically as they do geographically.  Here and here only both Eastern and Western Hemisphere show a strong affinity of race.  The Eskimo, long classed as Mongoloid, are now regarded as an aberrant variety of the American race, owing to their narrow headform and linguistic affinity; though in Alaska even their headform closely approximates the Mongoloid Siberian type.[754] But in stature, color, oblique eyes, broad flat face, and high cheek bones, in his temperament and character, artistic productions and some aspects of his culture, he groups with the Asiatic Hyperboreans across the narrow sixty miles of water forming Bering Strait.[755] In the northern part of the earth’s land area, the distribution of floras, faunas, and races shows interdependence, intercourse; in the southern, separation, isolation.

[Sidenote:  Continental convergence and ethnic kinship.]

What is true where the hemispheres come together is true also where continents converge.  The core of the Old World is found in the Mediterranean basin where Europe, Asia and Africa form a close circle of lands and where they are inhabited by the one white Mediterranean race.  Contrast their racial unity about this common center with the extremes of ethnic divergence in their remote peripheries, where Teutons, Mongols, Malays and Negroes differ widely from the Mediterranean stock and from each other.  Eastern Australia represents the ethnic antipodes of western Asia, in harmony with the great dividing distance between them, but the sides of these continents facing each other across the bridge of the Sunda Islands are sparsely strewn with a common Malay element.

[Sidenote:  Africa’s location.]

Africa’s early development was never helped by the fact that the continent lay between Asia and South America.  It was subjected to strong and persistent Asiatic Influences, but apparently to no native American ones.  From that far-off trans-Atlantic shore came no signs of life.  Africa appears in history as an appendage of Asia, a cultural peninsula of the larger continent.  This was due not only to the Suez Isthmus and the narrowness of the Red Sea rift, but to its one-sided invasion by Asiatic races and trade from the east, while the western side of the continent lay buried in sleep, unstirred by any voice from the silent shores of America.  Semitic influences, in successive waves, spread over the Dark Continent as far as Morocco, the Senegal, Niger, Lake Chad, Nyanza, Tanganyika and Nyassa, and gave it such light as it had before the 16th century.  Only after the Atlantic gulf was finally crossed did influences from the American side of the ocean begin to impinge upon the West African coast, first in the form of the slave and rum trade, then in the more humane aspect of the Liberian colony.  But with the full development of the Atlantic period in history, we see all kinds of Atlantic influences, though chiefly from the Atlantic states of Europe, penetrating eastward into the heart of Africa, and there meeting other commercial and political activities pressing inland from the Indian Ocean.