What islands have they tend to hold, to segregate, secrete from meddling hands, preserve untouched and unaltered.  Owing to this power to protect, islands show a large percentage of rare archaic forms of animal and plant life.  The insular fauna of Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and Madagascar display a succession of strange, ancestral forms going back to the biological infancy of the world.  The Canaries in the Atlantic and Celebes In the Pacific are museums of living antiquities, some of them dating probably from Miocene times.[916] Such survivals are found elsewhere only in high mountains, whose inaccessible slopes also offer protection against excessive competition.  Hence some of the antiquated species of insular Celebes, Formosa, Japan and Hainon occur again on the Asiatic mainland only in the Himalayas.[917]

For man, too, islands and their sister areas of isolation, mountains, are areas of survivals.  The shrinking remnants of that half-dwarf Negrito stock which may have formed the aboriginal population of southern Asia are found to-day only in the mountains of peninsular India and in island groups like the Andaman and the Philippines.  But even in the Philippines, they are confined either to the mountainous interiors of the larger islands, or to little coastal islets like Polillo, Alabat, Jomalig, and others.[918] [See map page 147.] Yezo, Sakhalin and the Kurile Isles harbor the last feeble remnants of the Ainos, a primitive people who formerly occupied a long stretch of the Asiatic coast south of the Amur mouth.  The protected environment of these islands has postponed the doom of extinction toward which the Ainos are hastening.[919] With insular conservatism they dress, live and seek their food on the sea to-day, just as depicted in Japanese art and literature at the dawn of history.[920] [See map page 103.]

[Sidenote:  Insular survivals of manners and customs.]

It is chiefly on islands of harsh climatic conditions, like Sakhalin, or of peculiarly restricted resources and area, like the Andaman, or of remote, side-tracked location, like Iceland, Sardinia and Cape Breton, that the stamp of the primitive or antiquated is strongest.  Even when not apparent in race stock, owing to the ubiquitous colonization of maritime peoples, it marks the language and customs of even these late-coming occupants, because an island environment asserts always some power to isolate.  This is due not only to the encircling moat of sea, but also to the restricted insular area, too small to attract to itself the great currents of human activity which infuse cosmopolitan ideas and innovations, and too poor to buy the material improvements which progress offers.  If the tourist in Sicily finds the women of Taormina or Girgenti spinning with a hand spindle, and the express trains moving only twelve miles an hour, he can take these two facts as the product of a small, detached area, although this island lies at the crossroads of the