Identifier: historyofmankind01ratz (find matches)
Title: The history of mankind
Year: 1896 (1890s)
Authors: Ratzel, Friedrich, 1844-1904 Butler, Arthur John, 1844-1910
Subjects: Ethnology Anthropology
Publisher: London, Macmillan and co., ltd. New York, The Macmillan co.
Contributing Library: Wellesley College Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Wellesley College Library

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an with Malayo-Polynesian ancestors. The peculiarities (of which we do not know the origin)belonging to the Papuan type are also noticeable here ; and we have besidesthe tendency to degradation in the traces of a low stage of culture and a life ofpoverty. The water surface of the earth extends in the sea alone to almost three- THE HISTORY OF MANKIND quarters of the whole, so that all the land is an island in a sea nearly three timesits size. The most widely separated portion of mankind must, even in the course oftheir movements in historical times, have been brought to the sea; and before theinvention of seafaring there must have been a time when the sea confined themto those regions which had been the cradle of the race. That invention, theearliest indications of which have long disappeared—for in all parts of the earth wefind high development of the art side by side with ignorance of it—was the firstthing that rendered possible the spread of mankind over almost all the habitable
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Fijian double canoe. (From a model in the Godeffroy Collection, Leipzig.) portions of the globe. In the most various parts of the earth we meet with thearts of shipbuilding and navigation in an advanced stage. This is most conspicuousin the Pacific, least so in the Atlantic. This irregular distribution is a sign of theease with which the art is forgotten ; so that we must not from its absence inplaces, and the absence even of any memory of it, infer a continued or completenon-activity in regard to the sea. Even if we did not meet, in Hawaii and else-where, with traditions of larger and better vessels in former times, the closeconnection which subsists between a high social and political organisation andproficiency in seafaring would presume the possibility of a rapid retrogressionin the latter. The Northmen sailed to Iceland, Greenland, America, in little boatswhich, perhaps, were not so good as those used by the Polynesians ; afterwardsthey lost sight of the land which had been their

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