Note 747 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

As the homes of man, these land-masses vary greatly owing to difference of size. Only the six continents have been large enough to generate great bodies of people, to produce differentiated branches of the human family, and to maintain them in such numerical force that alien intermixtures were powerless essentially to modify the gradually developing ethnic type. The larger continents are marked by such diversity of climate, relief and contour, that they have afforded the varied environments and the area for the development of several great types or sub-types of mankind. Australia has been just large enough to produce one distinct native race, the result of a very ancient blend of Papuan and Malayan stocks. But prevailing aridity has cast a mantle of monotony over most of the continent, nullifying many local geographic differences in highland and lowland, curtailing the available area of its already restricted surface, and hence checking the differentiation that results either from the competition of large numbers or from a varied environment. We find Australia characterized above all other continents by monotony of culture, mode of life, customs, languages, and a uniform race type from the Murray River to York peninsula. 747 The twin continents of the Americas developed a race singularly uniform in its physical traits,748 if we leave out of account the markedly divergent Eskimos, but displaying a wide range of political, social and economic developments, from the small, unorganized groups of wandering savages, like the desert Shoshones and coast Fuegians, to the large, stable empire of the Incas, with intensive agriculture, public works, a state religion and an enlightened government.