Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay to have been a slow zigzag movement,
interrupted by frequent long halts, leaving behind one laggard group
here and sending out an offshoot there, who formed new tribes and
thereby diversified the stock.[132] It was an aimless wandering, without
destination and purpose other than to find a pleasanter habitat. The
Vandals appear first as "a loose aggregation of restless tribes who must
not be too definitely assigned to any precise district on the map,"
somewhere in central or eastern Prussia.[133] Far-reaching migrations
aiming at a distant goal, like the Gothic and Hunnish conquests of
Italy, demand both a geographical knowledge and an organization too high
for primitive peoples, and therefore belong to a later period of
development.[134]

[Sidenote: Number and range.]

The long list of recorded migrations has been supplemented by the
researches of ethnologists, which have revealed a multitude of
prehistoric movements. These are disclosed in greater number and range
with successive investigation. The prehistoric wanderings of the
Polynesians assume far more significance to-day than a hundred years
ago, when their scope was supposed to have its western limit at Fiji and
the Ellice group. They have now been traced to almost every island of
Melanesia; vestiges of their influence have been detected in the
languages of Australia, and the culture of the distant coasts of Alaska
and British Columbia. The western pioneers of America knew the Shoshone
Indians as small bands of savages, constantly moving about in search of
food in the barren region west of the Rocky Mountains, and occasionally
venturing eastward to hunt buffalo on the plains. Recent investigation
has identified as offshoots of this retarded Shoshonean stock the
sedentary agriculturalists of the Moqui Pueblo, and the advanced