It is this marked national individuality, developed by isolation and accompanied often by a precocious civilization, in combination with the opposite fact of the imminent possibility of an expansive unfolding, a brilliant efflorescence followed by a wide dispersal of its seeds of culture and of empire, which has assigned to islands in all times a great historical role.  Rarely do these wholly originate the elements of civilization.  For that their area is too small.  But whatever seed ripen in the wide fields of the continents the islands transplant to their own forcing houses; there they transform and perfect the flower.  Japan borrowed freely from China and Korea, as England did from continental Europe; but these two island realms have brought Asiatic and European civilization to their highest stage of development.  Now the borrowers are making return with generous hand.  The islands are reacting upon the continents.  Japanese ideals are leavening the whole Orient from Manchuria to Ceylon.  English civilization is the standard of Europe.  “The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English,” says Emerson.  “England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence and tastes."[822]

[Sidenote:  Ancient Cretan civilization.]

The recent discoveries in Crete show beyond doubt that the school of Aegean civilization was in that island.  Ancient Phoenicia, Argos, even Mycenae and Tiryns put off their mask of age and appear as rosy boys learning none too aptly of their great and elderly master.  Borrowing the seeds of culture from Asia and Egypt,[823] Crete nursed and tended them through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, transformed them completely, much as scientific tillage has converted the cotton tree into a low shrub.  The precocity of this civilization is clear.  At early as 3000 B.C. it included an impressive style of architecture and a decorative art naturalistic and beautiful in treatment as that of modern Japan.[824] From this date till the zenith of its development in 1450 B.C., Crete became a great artistic manufacturing and distributing center for stone carving, frescoes, pottery, delicate porcelain, metal work, and gems.[825] By 1800 B. C., seven centuries before Phoenician writing is heard of, the island had matured a linear script out of an earlier pictographic form.[826] This script, partly indigenous, partly borrowed from Libya and Egypt, gives Crete the distinction of having invented the first system of writing ever practised in Europe.[827]

Yet all this wealth of achievement bore the stamp of the indigenous; nearly every trace of its remote Asiatic or Egyptian origin was obliterated.  Here the isolation of an island environment did thoroughly its work of differentiation, even on this thalassic isle which maintained constant intercourse with Egypt, the Cyclades, the Troad and the Greek peninsula.[828] Minoan art has a freshness, vivacity, and modernity that distinguishes it fundamentally from the formal