far-off Easter Isle.  Sometimes the emigration is a voluntary exile from home for a short period and a definite purpose.  The inhabitants of Bouton, Binungku, and the neighboring islets, all of them located southeast of Celebes, have for the past twenty-five years come in great numbers to the larger islands of Ceram, Buru, Amboina and Banda, where they have laid out and carefully cultivated plantations of maize, tobacco, bananas and coco-palms.  Generally only the men come, work two years, save their profits and then return home.  These ambitious tillers look like savages, are shy as wild things of the woods, and work naked to the waist.[987]

Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, where every condition of land and sea tends to develop the migratory spirit, form a region of extensive colonization.[988] Settlements of one race are scattered among the island groups of another, making the ethnic boundaries wide penumbras.  In some smaller islands of Melanesia the Polynesian colonists have exterminated or expelled the original inhabitants, and are found there now with all their distinctive race characteristics; but in the larger islands, they have been merged in the resident population, and their presence is only to be surmised from the existence of Polynesian customs, such as father-right in New Hebrides and Solomon Island side by side with the prevailing Melanesian mother-right.[989] In small islands, like Tongatabu, Samoa and Fiji, emigration becomes habitual, a gradual spilling over of the redundant population and hence not a formidable inundation.  In all this insular region of the Pacific, the impulse to emigration is so persistent, that the resulting inter-insular colonization obliterates sharp distinctions of race; it annuls the segregation of an island environment, and makes everywhere for amalgamation and unification, rather than differentiation.[990]

[Sidenote:  Modern emigration from islands.]

Among highly civilized peoples, where better economic methods bring greater density of population and set at the same time a higher standard of living, emigration from islands is especially marked.  Japan has seen a formidable exodus since an end was put to its long period of compression.  This has taken the form of widespread emigration to various foreign lands, notably the Hawaiian Islands and the United States, and also of internal colonization in its recently acquired territory in Formosa and Korea.[991] The Maltese have spread from their congested island, and are found to-day as gardeners, sailors and traders along all the Mediterranean coasts.[992] Majorca and the more barren Cyclades[993] tell the same story.  The men of Capri go in considerable numbers to South America, but generally return home again.  The Icelanders often pull themselves out of the stagnation of their lonely, ungenerous island to become thrifty citizens of western Canada.

[Sidenote:  Maritime enterprise as outlet.]