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 STUDIES IN POLITICAL AREAS 379

to the greatest, oftentimes most violent, changes. The rapid disappearance of the Guiana Indians, Caribs, and Tasmanians illustrates the extreme effect of this. The population of the Libyan oases' is on the road to the same end; as the increase is artificially checked, the negro threatens to become the dom- inant element, causing a substitution of race such as has already taken place in Jamaica and other small islands of the West Indies, or, in times for us prehistoric, upon the islands of Mela- nesia form the spread of settlers from Polynesia and Micro

nesia.'

Friedrich Ratzel.

(Translated by Ellen C. Semple.)

■ G. RoHLFS, in the Geographische Mittrilungen, p. 447, i860 : " The importation of negroes goes on continually; and since neither the Berbers nor Arabs receive new white elements, as was formerly the case, through Christian slaves, it can easily be fore- seen that in a given time, conditions remaining the same, Berbers and Arabs will be absorbed by the black population."

•Chapters I and II in this series appeared in this Journal, November, 1897 and January, 1898.