Other such areas are unexplored--yet we presume them to be occupied; though ever so thinly: _e. g._ the interiors of New Guinea and Australia.
That Greenland was known to the early Icelanders is well known. And that it was occupied when so first known is also certain. One of the geographical localities mentioned in an old Saga has an Eskimo word for one of its elements--_Utibuks-firth_ = _the firth of the isthmus_; _Utibuk_ in Eskimo meaning _isthmus_.
Of the islands originally uninhabited those which are, at one and the same time, large and near continents are Madeira and Iceland--the former being a lonely wood. The Canaries, though smaller and more isolated, have been occupied by the remarkable family of the Guanches. Add to these, Ascension, St. Helena, the Galapagos, Kerguelen’s Island, and a few others.
Easter Island, a speck in the vast Pacific, and more than half way between Asia and America, exhibited both inhabitants and ruins to its first discoverers.
Such is the _horizontal_ distribution of Man; _i.e._ his distribution according to the degrees of latitude. What other animal has such a range? What species? What genus or order? Contrast with this the localized habitats of the Orang-utan, and the Chimpanzee as species; of the Apes as genera; of the Marsupialia as orders.
The _vertical_ distribution is as wide. By _vertical_ I mean elevation above the level of the sea. On the high table-land of Pamer we have the Kerghiz; summer visitants at least, where the _Yak_ alone, among domesticated animals, lives and breathes in the rarefied atmosphere. The town of Quito is more than 10,000 feet above the sea; Walcheren is, perhaps, below the level of it.
Who expects uniformity of physiognomy or frame with such a distribution?
_The size of ethnological areas._--Comparatively speaking, Europe is pretty equally divided amongst the European families. The Slavonic populations of Bohemia, Silesia, Poland, Servia, and Russia may, perhaps, have more than their due--still the French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Wallachians, all speaking languages of classical origin, have their share; and so has our own Germanic or Gothic family of English, Dutch, Frisians, Bavarians, and Scandinavians. Nevertheless, there are a few families as limited in geographical area as subordinate in political importance. There are the Escaldunac, or Basques,--originally the occupants of all Spain and half France, now pent up in a corner of the Pyrenees--the Welsh of the Iberic Peninsula. There are, also, the Skipetar, or Albanians; wedged in between Greece, Turkey, and Dalmatia. Nevertheless, the respective areas of the European families are pretty equally distributed; and the land of Europe is like a lottery wherein all the prizes are of an appreciable value.