Note 750 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

The continents harbor the most widely different races where they are farthest apart; where they converge most nearly, they show the closest ethnic kinships. The same principle becomes apparent in their plants and animals. The distribution of the land-masses over the earth is conspicuous for their convergence in the north and divergence in long peninsular forms toward the south. The contrasted grouping is reflected in both, the lower animals and the peoples inhabiting these respectively vicinal and remote lands. Only where North America and Eurasia stretch out arms to one another around the polar sea do Eastern and Western Hemisphere show a community of mammalian forms. These are all strictly Arctic animals, such as the reindeer, elk, Arctic fox, glutton and ermine.750 This is the Boreal sub-region of the Holoarctic zoological realm, characterized by a very homogeneous and very limited fauna. 751 In contrast, the portion of the hemispheres lying south of the Tropic of Cancer is divided into four distinct zoological realms, corresponding to Central and South America, Africa south of Sahara, the two Indian peninsulas with the adjacent islands, and Australia.752 But when we consider the continental extremities projecting beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, where geographic divergence reaches a climax, we find their faunas and floras utterly dissimilar, despite the fact that climate and physical conditions are very similar.753 We find also widely divergent races in the southern sections of Africa, Australia or Tasmania and South America, while Arctic Eurasia and America come as near meeting ethnically as they do geographically. Here and here only both Eastern and Western Hemisphere show a strong affinity of race. The Eskimo, long classed as Mongoloid, are now regarded as an aberrant variety of the American race, owing to their narrow headform and linguistic affinity; though in Alaska even their headform closely approximates the Mongoloid Siberian type.754 But in stature, color, oblique eyes, broad flat face, and high cheek bones, in his temperament and character, artistic productions and some aspects of his culture, he groups with the Asiatic Hyperboreans across the narrow sixty miles of water forming Bering Strait.755 In the northern part of the earth's land area, the distribution of floras, faunas, and races shows interdependence, intercourse; in the southern, separation, isolation.