In their many and varied arts they have freely borrowed from their neighbors; but they have developed these loans with such marvelous skill and independence that they greatly surpass their early masters, and are accredited with possessing the creative genius of all this coast.[835] Far away, on the remote southeastern outskirts of the island world of the Pacific, a parallel is presented by little Easter Isle.  Once it was densely populated and completely tilled by a people who had achieved singular progress in agriculture, religion, masonry, sculpture in stone and wood carving, even with obsidian tools, and who alone of all the Polynesians had devised a form of hieroglyphical writing.[836] Easter Isle to-day shows only abandoned fields, the silent monuments of its huge stone idols, and the shrunken remnant of a deteriorated people.[837]

[Sidenote:  Sources of ethnic stock of islands.]

Isolation and accessibility are recorded in the ethnic stock of every island.  Like its flora and fauna, its aboriginal population shows an affinity to that of the nearest mainland, and this generally in proportion to geographical proximity.  The long line of deposit islands, built of the off-scourings of the land, and fringing the German and Netherland coast from Texel to Wangeroog, is inhabited by the same Frisian folk which occupies the nearby shore.  The people of the Channel Isles, though long subject to England, belong to the Franco-Gallic stock and the langue d’oil linguistic family of northern France.  The native Canary Islanders, though giving no evidence of previous communication with any continental land at the time of their discovery, could be traced, through their physical features, speech, customs and utensils, to a remote origin in Egypt and the Berber regions of North Africa prior to the Mohammedan conquest.[838] Sakhalin harbors to-day, besides the immigrant Russians, five different peoples—­Ainos, Gilyaks, Orochons, Tunguse, and Yakuts, all of them offshoots of tribes now or formerly found on the Siberian mainland a few miles away.[839]

[Sidenote:  Ethnic divergence with increased isolation.]

Where the isolation of the island is more pronounced, owing either to a broader and more dangerous channel, as in the case of Madagascar and Formosa, or to the nautical incapacity of the neighboring coast peoples, as in the case of Tasmania and the Canary Islands, the ethnic influence of the mainland is weak, and the ethnic divergence of the insular population therefore more marked, even to the point of total difference in race.  But this is generally a case of survival of a primitive stock in the protection of an unattractive island offering to a superior people few allurements to conquest, as illustrated by the ethnic history of the Andaman and Kurile Isles.

[Sidenote:  Differentiation of peoples and civilizations on islands.]