Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/307

Rh they were social protozoa. When colonization took place, the city split "by natural fracture" (the words are Grote's) into two or more cities, each an autonomous and separate unit, as Phocæa sent nearly one half of its citizens to Sardinia. Or a city gave birth to a number of cities, as Andros (itself a colony of Eretria) to Samê, Akanthus, Stageira, and Argilus. Sometimes even Greek and Phœnician colonies (celebrated for their independence) remained connected with the mother city, as when Sybaris ruled over twenty-five dependent towns, and Carthage welded three hundred communities into her wide commercial empire. Often the reproduction was concentrated into a single extrusion or overflow, as when Thera colonized Gyrene. Most of the colonies were smaller than the metropolis, but Sybaris and Carthage must have greatly exceeded the parent states.

The Roman colonies were of higher structure. They may be described as midway between the city type of colony and the national type. The earliest were hived off from the mother city and acquired some of the civic character that she retained all through her history till she was nationalized in 1870. They may be compared, like certain of the Greek colonial groups, to the progeny that surrounds a zoöphyte and 'remains in asexual continuity with it; but, though they long retained a certain independence, they showed that they belonged to a higher type by being ultimately incorporated with the Roman Empire.

The earliest modern colonies, with a still higher potentiality of future development, had the same asexual character as the earliest Phœnician, Greek, and Roman colonies. They were the spontaneous offshoots of the mother country, and they were of low organization. The whole asexual or unorganized division may be classified in five or six groups.

The pioneers of colonization were pirates and marauders, fishermen and navigators, hunters and traders, explorers and discoverers, missionaries, runaways, adventurers, and convicts. It would be impossible to make a tripos of these very miscellaneous groups, or arrange them in the order of time or importance. As the exterior cells of a floating organism push outward at one or more points in search of food, many, perhaps most, colonies have their beginnings in the spontaneous efforts of independent sections of a community, situated on or near its boundaries, which extend to ever more distant parts their exertions in search of a livelihood. It is easier to rob others than to procure spoil or food where they found or reared it, and so privateers and marauding adventurers may have preceded fishermen and hunters. The earliest Greek and Roman colonies seem to have been founded by just such bands. The Spanish and