fleets, and had its Phoenician settlements in 1045 B. C. From that time it was one of the many prizes in the Mediterranean grab-bag for the surrounding nations.  After the decline of Tyre, it was occupied by Greeks, then passed in turn to Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, Saracens, Byzantines, and in 1191 was seized by the Crusaders.  Later it fell to Egypt again; but in 1373 was taken by Genoa, in 1463 by Venice, in 1571 by the Turks, and finally in 1878 was consigned to England.[869] All these successive occupants have left their mark upon its people, speech, culture and architecture.  In the same way Sicily, located at the waist of the Mediterranean, has received the imprint of Greeks, Carthagenians, Romans, Saracens, Normans, Spaniards and Italians.[870] Its architectural remains bear the stamp of these successive occupants in every degree of purity and blending.  The Sicilians of to-day are a mixture of all these intrusive stocks and speak a form of Italian corrupted by the infusion of Arabic words.[871] In 1071 when the Normans laid siege to Palermo, five languages were spoken on the island,—­Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and vulgar Sicilian, evidence enough that it was the meeting ground of the nations of Europe, Asia and North Africa.[872] Polyglot Malta to-day tells the same story of successive conquests, the same shuttlecock history.[873] Almost every language of Europe is spoken here; but the native Maltese speech is a corrupt form of Arabic mixed with modern Italian and ancient Phoenician words.[874] The whole island is ethnographically a border hybrid of Europe and North Africa.  The Channel Isles are to-day the only spot in Europe where French and English survive side by side as official and commercial languages.  French and Italian meet on equal terms in Corsica.  Chinese, Japanese and Malays have traded and warred and treated on the debatable land of Formosa.  The Aru, Ke, and other small archipelagoes of the Banda Sea link together the pure Malay and the pure Papuan districts, between which they lie.

From the border character of many islands there follow often far-reaching historical effects.  Like all border regions they are natural battlegrounds.  Their historical episodes are small, often slow and insidious in their movement, but large in their final content; for they are prone to end in a sudden dramatic denouement that draws the startled gaze of all the neighboring world.  It was the destiny of Sicily to make and unmake the fortunes of ancient Carthage.  Ceylon, from the dawn of history, lured traders who enriched and conquerors who oppressed peninsular India.  The advance of Spain to the Canary Isles was the drowsy prologue to the brilliant drama of American discovery.  The island of Tsushima in the Korean Strait was seized by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1280 as the base of their attack upon Japan;[875] and when in 1857 the Russian bear tried to plant a foot on this island, Japan saw danger in the movement and ordered him off.[876] Now we find Japan newly established in Sakhalin, the Elliot Islands and Formosa, by means of which and her own archipelago she blankets the coast of Asia for twenty-two hundred miles.  This geographical situation may be productive of history.