physical and political barrenness of the adjacent regions of Africa and
the strategic importance of the isthmian district between the
Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.

[Sidenote: Scattered location due to geographic conditions.]

The forms of vicinal location thus far considered presuppose a compact
or continuous distribution, such as characterizes the more fertile and
populous areas of the earth. Desert regions, whether due to Arctic cold
or extreme aridity, distribute their sparse population in small groups
at a few favored points, and thus from physical causes give rise to the
anthropo-geographical phenomenon of scattered location. Districts of
intense cold, which sustain life only in contact with marine supplies of
food, necessitate an intermittent distribution along the seaboard, with
long, unoccupied stretches between. This is the location we are familiar
with among the Eskimo of Greenland and Alaska, among the Norse and Lapps
in the rugged Norwegian province of Finmarken, where over two-thirds of
the population live by fishing. In the interior districts of this
province about Karasjok and Kantokeino, the reindeer Lapps show a
corresponding scattered grouping here and there on the inhospitable
slopes of the mountains.[260] In that one-half of Switzerland lying above
the altitude where agriculture is possible, population is sprinkled at
wide intervals over the sterile surface of the highlands.

A somewhat similar scattered location is found in arid deserts, where
population is restricted to the oases dropped here and there at wide
intervals amid the waste of sand. But unlike those fragments of human
life on the frozen outskirts of the habitable world, the oasis states
usually constitute links in a chain of connection across the desert
between the fertile lands on either side, and therefore form part of a