Insular protection was undoubtedly a factor in the brilliant cultural development of Crete.  The progress of the early civilization from the late Stone Age through the Bronze Age was continuous; it bears no trace of any strong outside influence or sudden transition, no evidence of disturbance like an invasion or conquest by an alien people till 1200 B. C. when the latest stage of Minoan art was crushed by barbarian incursion from the north.[893]

[Sidenote:  Factor of protection in Ceylon and Japan.]

The early history of the Singhalese monarchy in Ceylon from 250 B. C. to 416 A. D., when even the narrow moat of Palk Strait discouraged Tamil invasions from the mainland, shows the brilliant development possible under even a slight degree of protection.[894] However, in the case of these Ceylon Aryans, as in that of the Icelandic Norse, we must keep in mind the fact that the bearers of this culture were picked men, as are early maritime colonists the world over.  The sea selects and then protects its island folk.  But the seclusion of Ceylon was more favorable to progress than the mainland of India, with its incessant political and religious upheavals.  Japan, in contrast to China’s long list of invasions, shows the peace of an insular location.  She never suffered any overwhelming influx of alien races or any foreign conquest.  The armada sent by Kublai Khan in 1281 to subdue the islands paralleled the experience of the famous Spanish fleet three centuries later in English waters.  This is the only attempt to invade Japan that recorded history shows.[895] In the original peopling of the island by Mongolian stock at the cost of the Aino aborigines, there is evidence of two distinct and perhaps widely separated immigrations from the mainland, one from Korea and another from more northern Asia.  Thus Japan’s population contained two continental elements, which seem to have held themselves in the relation of governing and governed class, much as Norman and Saxon did in England, while the Ainos lingered in the geographical background of mountain fastness and outlying islands, as the primitive Celts did in the British Isles.[896] In the case both of England and Japan, the island location made the occupation by continental races a fitful, piecemeal process, not an inundation, because only small parties could land from time to time.  The result was gradual or partial amalgamation of the various stocks, but nowhere annihilation.

[Sidenote:  Character of the invaders as factor.]

But island location was not the sole factor in the equation.  Similarity of race and relative parity of civilization between the successive immigrants and the original population, as well as the small numbers of the Invaders, made the struggle for the ownership of the island not wholly one-sided, and was later favorable to amalgamation in England as in Japan; whereas very small bands of far-coming Spaniards in the Canaries, Cuba, and Porto Rico resulted in the