Note 262 — Chapter V · —Geographical Location

Quite different from this scattered distribution, due to physical conditions, in an otherwise uninhabited waste is that wide dispersal of a people in small detached groups which is the rule in lower stages of culture, and which bespeaks the necessity of relatively large territorial reserves for the uneconomic method of land utilization characteristic of hunting, fishing, pastoral nomadism, and primitive agriculture. A distribution which claims large areas, without, however, maintaining exclusive possession or complete occupation, indicates among advanced peoples an unfinished process,262 especially unfinished expansion, such as marked the early French and English colonies in America and the recent Russian occupation of Siberia. Among primitive peoples it is the normal condition, belongs to the stage of civilization, not to any one land or any one race, though it has been called the American form of distribution.