CHAPTER XVII. THE INFLUENCES OF CLIMATE UPON MAN

Importance of climatic influences--Climate in the interplay of

geographic factors--Its direct and indirect effects--Climate determines

the habitable area of the earth--Effect of climate upon relief and hence

upon man--Man's adaptability to climatic extremes--Temperature as

modified by oceans and winds--Rainfall--Temperature and zonal

location--Mutual reactions of contrasted zones--Isothermal lines in

anthropo-geography--Historical effects of compressed

isotherms--Historical effects of slight climatic differences--Their

influence upon distribution of immigration--Temperature and race

temperament--Complexity of this problem--Monotonous climatic

conditions--Effects of Arctic cold--Effect of monotonous heat--The

tropics as goals of migration--The problem of

acclimatization--Historical importance of the temperate zone--Contrast

of the seasons--Duration of the seasons--Effect of long winters and long

summers--Zones of culture--Temperate zone as cradle of civilization

INDEX

LIST OF MAPS.

DENSITY OF POPULATION IN THE EASTERN HEMISPHERE 8

DENSITY OF POPULATION IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE 9

POWELL'S MAP OF INDIAN LINGUISTIC STOCKS 54

PRIMITIVE INDIAN STOCKS OF SOUTH AMERICA 101

ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF INDIA 102

ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF ASIA 103

ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF AFRICA 105

DISTRIBUTION OF WILD AND CIVILIZED TRIBES IN THE PHILIPPINES 147

DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN THE PROVINCE OF FINMARKEN 153

DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1800 156

THE SLAV-GERMAN BOUNDARY IN EUROPE 223

ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF RUSSIA 225

THE GERMAN NORTH SEA COAST 243

ANCIENT PHOENICIAN AND GREEK COLONIES 251

RIPARIAN VILLAGES OF THE LOWER ST. LAWRENCE 365

LAKE OF THE FOUR FOREST CANTONS 374

THE ANNUAL RAINFALL OF THE WORLD 484

THE CULTURAL REGIONS OF AFRICA AND ARABIA 487

DISTRIBUTION OF RELIGIONS IN THE OLD WORLD 513

DENSITY OF POPULATION IN ITALY 559

MEAN ANNUAL ISOTHERMS AND HEAT BELTS 612

CHAPTER I

THE OPERATION OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY

[Sidenote: Man a product of the earth's surface.]

Man is a product of the earth's surface. This means not merely that he

is a child of the earth, dust of her dust; but that the earth has

mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted

him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his

wits, given him his problems of navigation or irrigation, and at the

same time whispered hints for their solution. She has entered into his

bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. On the mountains she has given

him leg muscles of iron to climb the slope; along the coast she has left

these weak and flabby, but given him instead vigorous development of

chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar. In the river valley she

attaches him to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas and ambitions

by a dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the

cramped horizon of his farm. Up on the wind-swept plateaus, in the

boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the

desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis

to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of

drudgery, where the watching of grazing herd gives him leisure for

contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take

on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God

becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert and the grass of the

steppe, stretching on and on without break or change. Chewing over and

over the cud of his simple belief as the one food of his unfed mind, his

faith becomes fanaticism; his big spacial ideas, born of that ceaseless

regular wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their

legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests.

Man can no more be scientifically studied apart from the ground which he

tills, or the lands over which he travels, or the seas over which he

trades, than polar bear or desert cactus can be understood apart from

its habitat. Man's relations to his environment are infinitely more

numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or

animal. So complex are they that they constitute a legitimate and

necessary object of special study. The investigation which they receive

in anthropology, ethnology, sociology and history is piecemeal and

partial, limited as to the race, cultural development, epoch, country or

variety of geographic conditions taken into account. Hence all these

sciences, together with history so far as history undertakes to explain

the causes of events, fail to reach a satisfactory solution of their

problems largely because the geographic factor which enters into them

all has not been thoroughly analyzed. Man has been so noisy about the

way he has "conquered Nature," and Nature has been so silent in her

persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the

equation of human development has been overlooked.

[Sidenote: Stability of geographic factors in history.]

In every problem of history there are two main factors, variously stated

as heredity and environment, man and his geographic conditions, the

internal forces of race and the external forces of habitat. Now the

geographic element in the long history of human development has been

operating strongly and operating persistently. Herein lies its

importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural

environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and

purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the

problem--shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man.

[Sidenote: Persistent effect of remoteness.]

History tends to repeat itself largely owing to this steady, unchanging

geographic element. If the ancient Roman consul in far-away Britain

often assumed an independence of action and initiative unknown in the

provincial governors of Gaul, and if, centuries later, Roman Catholicism

in England maintained a similar independence towards the Holy See, both

facts have their cause in the remoteness of Britain from the center of

political or ecclesiastical power in Rome. If the independence of the

Roman consul in Britain was duplicated later by the attitude of the

Thirteen Colonies toward England, and again within the young Republic by

the headstrong self-reliance, impatient of government authority, which

characterized the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths in their

aggressive Indian policy, and led them to make war and conclude treaties

for the cession of land like sovereign states; and if this attitude of

independence in the over-mountain men reappeared in a spirit of

political defection looking toward secession from the Union and a new

combination with their British neighbor on the Great Lakes or the

Spanish beyond the Mississippi, these are all the identical effects of

geographical remoteness made yet more remote by barriers of mountain and

sea. This is the long reach which weakens the arm of authority, no

matter what the race or country or epoch.

[Sidenote: Effect of proximity.]

As with geographical remoteness, so it is with geographical proximity.

The history of the Greek peninsula and the Greek people, because of

their location at the threshold of the Orient, has contained a

constantly recurring Asiatic element. This comes out most often as a

note of warning; like the _motif_ of Ortrud in the opera of

"Lohengrin," it mingles ominously in every chorus of Hellenic

enterprise or paean of Hellenic victory, and finally swells into a

national dirge at the Turkish conquest of the peninsula. It comes out

in the legendary history of the Argonautic Expedition and the Trojan

War; in the arrival of Phoenician Cadmus and Phrygian Pelops in

Grecian lands; in the appearance of Tyrian ships on the coast of the

Peloponnesus, where they gather the purple-yielding murex and kidnap

Greek women. It appears more conspicuously in the Asiatic sources of

Greek culture; more dramatically in the Persian Wars, in the retreat

of Xenophon's Ten Thousand, in Alexander's conquest of Asia, and

Hellenic domination of Asiatic trade through Syria to the

Mediterranean. Again in the thirteenth century the lure of the

Levantine trade led Venice and Genoa to appropriate certain islands

and promontories of Greece as commercial bases nearer to Asia. In 1396

begins the absorption of Greece into the Asiatic empire of the Turks,

the long dark eclipse of sunny Hellas, till it issues from the shadow

in 1832 with the achievement of Greek independence.

[Sidenote: Persistent effect of natural barriers.]

If the factor is not one of geographical location, but a natural

barrier, such as a mountain system or a desert, its effect is just as

persistent. The upheaved mass of the Carpathians served to divide the

westward moving tide of the Slavs into two streams, diverting one into

the maritime plain of northern Germany and Poland, the other into the

channel of the Danube Valley which guided them to the Adriatic and the

foot of the Alps. This same range checked the westward advance of the

mounted Tartar hordes. The Alps long retarded Roman expansion into

central Europe, just as they delayed and obstructed the southward

advance of the northern barbarians. Only through the partial breaches in

the wall known as passes did the Alps admit small, divided bodies of the

invaders, like the Cimbri and Teutons, who arrived, therefore, with

weakened power and at intervals, so that the Roman forces had time to

gather their strength between successive attacks, and thus prolonged the

life of the declining empire. So in the Middle Ages, the Alpine barrier

facilitated the resistance of Italy to the German emperors, trying to

enforce their claim upon this ancient seat of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was by river-worn valleys leading to passes in the ridge that

Etruscan trader, Roman legion, barbarian horde, and German army crossed

the Alpine ranges. To-day well-made highways and railroads converge upon

these valley paths and summit portals, and going is easier; but the Alps

still collect their toll, now in added tons of coal consumed by engines

and in higher freight rates, instead of the ancient imposts of physical

exhaustion paid by pack animal and heavily accoutred soldier. Formerly

these mountains barred the weak and timid; to-day they bar the poor, and

forbid transit to all merchandise of large bulk and small value which

can not pay the heavy transportation charges. Similarly, the wide

barrier of the Rockies, prior to the opening of the first overland

railroad, excluded all but strong-limbed and strong-hearted pioneers

from the fertile valleys of California and Oregon, just as it excludes

coal and iron even from the Colorado mines, and checks the free

movement of laborers to the fields and factories of California, thereby

tightening the grip of the labor unions upon Pacific coast industries.

[Sidenote: Persistent effect of nature-made highways.]

As the surface of the earth presents obstacles, so it offers channels

for the easy movement of humanity, grooves whose direction determines

the destination of aimless, unplanned migrations, and whose termini

become, therefore, regions of historical importance. Along these

nature-made highways history repeats itself. The maritime plain of

Palestine has been an established route of commerce and war from the

time of Sennacherib to Napoleon.[1] The Danube Valley has admitted to

central Europe a long list of barbarian invaders, covering the period

from Attila the Hun to the Turkish besiegers of Vienna in 1683. The

history of the Danube Valley has been one of warring throngs, of

shifting political frontiers, and unassimilated races; but as the river

is a great natural highway, every neighboring state wants to front upon

it and strives to secure it as a boundary.

The movements of peoples constantly recur to these old grooves. The

unmarked path of the voyageur's canoe, bringing out pelts from Lake

Superior to the fur market at Montreal, is followed to-day by whaleback

steamers with their cargoes of Manitoba wheat. To-day the Mohawk

depression through the northern Appalachians diverts some of Canada's

trade from the Great Lakes to the Hudson, just as in the seventeenth

century it enabled the Dutch at New Amsterdam and later the English at

Albany to tap the fur trade of Canada's frozen forests. Formerly a line

of stream and portage, it carries now the Erie Canal and New York

Central Railroad.[2] Similarly the narrow level belt of land extending

from the mouth of the Hudson to the eastern elbow of the lower Delaware,

defining the outer margin of the rough hill country of northern New

Jersey and the inner margin of the smooth coastal plain, has been from

savage days such a natural thoroughfare. Here ran the trail of the

Lenni-Lenapi Indians; a little later, the old Dutch road between New

Amsterdam and the Delaware trading-posts; yet later the King's Highway

from New York to Philadelphia. In 1838 it became the route of the

Delaware and Raritan Canal, and more recently of the Pennsylvania

Railroad between New York and Philadelphia.[3]

The early Aryans, in their gradual dispersion over northwestern India,

reached the Arabian Sea chiefly by a route running southward from the

Indus-Ganges divide, between the eastern border of the Rajputana Desert

and the western foot of the Aravalli Hills. The streams flowing down

from this range across the thirsty plains unite to form the Luni River,

which draws a dead-line to the advance of the desert. Here a smooth and

well-watered path brought the early Aryans of India to a fertile coast

along the Gulf of Cambay.[4] In the palmy days of the Mongol Empire

during the seventeenth century, and doubtless much earlier, it became an

established trade route between the sea and the rich cities of the upper

Ganges.[5] Recently it determined the line of the Rajputana Railroad

from the Gulf of Cambay to Delhi.[6] Barygaza, the ancient seaboard

terminus of this route, appears in Pliny's time as the most famous

emporium of western India, the resort of Greek and Arab merchants.[7] It

reappears later in history with its name metamorphosed to Baroche or

Broach, where in 1616 the British established a factory for trade,[8]

but is finally superseded, under Portuguese and English rule, by nearby

Surat. Thus natural conditions fix the channels in which the stream of

humanity most easily moves, determine within certain limits the

direction of its flow, the velocity and volume of its current. Every new

flood tends to fit itself approximately into the old banks, seeks first

these lines of least resistance, and only when it finds them blocked or

pre-empted does it turn to more difficult paths.

[Sidenote: Regions of historical similarity.]

Geographical environment, through the persistence of its influence,

acquires peculiar significance. Its effect is not restricted to a given

historical event or epoch, but, except when temporarily met by some

strong counteracting force, tends to make itself felt under varying

guise in all succeeding history. It is the permanent element in the

shifting fate of races. Islands show certain fundamental points of

agreement which can be distinguished in the economic, ethnic and

historical development of England, Japan, Melanesian Fiji, Polynesian

New Zealand, and pre-historic Crete. The great belt of deserts and

steppes extending across the Old World gives us a vast territory of rare

historical uniformity. From time immemorial they have borne and bred

tribes of wandering herdsmen; they have sent out the invading hordes

who, in successive waves of conquest, have overwhelmed the neighboring

river lowlands of Eurasia and Africa. They have given birth in turn to

Scythians, Indo-Aryans, Avars, Huns, Saracens, Tartars and Turks, as to

the Tuareg tribes of the Sahara, the Sudanese and Bantu folk of the

African grasslands. But whether these various peoples have been Negroes,

Hamites, Semites, Indo-Europeans or Mongolians, they have always been

pastoral nomads. The description given by Herodotus of the ancient

Scythians is applicable in its main features to the Kirghis and Kalmuck

who inhabit the Caspian plains to-day. The environment of this dry

grassland operates now to produce the same mode of life and social

organization as it did 2,400 years ago; stamps the cavalry tribes of

Cossacks as it did the mounted Huns, energizes its sons by its dry

bracing air, toughens them by its harsh conditions of life, organizes

them into a mobilized army, always moving with its pastoral

commissariat. Then when population presses too hard upon the meager

sources of subsistence, when a summer drought burns the pastures and

dries up the water-holes, it sends them forth on a mission of conquest,

to seek abundance in the better watered lands of their agricultural

neighbors. Again and again the productive valleys of the Hoangho, Indus,

Ganges, Tigris and Euphrates, Nile, Volga, Dnieper and Danube have been

brought into subjection by the imperious nomads of arid Asia, just as

the "hoe-people" of the Niger and upper Nile have so often been

conquered by the herdsmen of the African grasslands. Thus, regardless of

race or epoch--Hyksos or Kaffir--history tends to repeat itself in these

rainless tracts, and involves the better watered districts along their

borders when the vast tribal movements extend into these peripheral

lands.

[Illustration: DENSITY OF POPULATION IN EASTERN HEMISPHERE]

[Illustration: DENSITY OF POPULATION IN WESTERN HEMISPHERE]

[Sidenote: Climatic influences.]

Climatic influences are persistent, often obdurate in their control.

Arid regions permit agriculture and sedentary life only through

irrigation. The economic prosperity of Egypt to-day depends as

completely upon the distribution of the Nile waters as in the days of

the Pharaohs. The mantle of the ancient Egyptian priest has fallen upon

the modern British engineer. Arctic explorers have succeeded only by

imitating the life of the Eskimos, adopting their clothes, food, fuel,

dwellings, and mode of travel. Intense cold has checked both native and

Russian development over that major portion of Siberia lying north of

the mean annual isotherm of degree C. (32 degrees F.); and it has had a

like effect in the corresponding part of Canada. (Compare maps pages 8

and 9.) It allows these sub-arctic lands scant resources and a

population of less than two to the square mile. Even with the intrusion

of white colonial peoples, it perpetuates the savage economy of the

native hunting tribes, and makes the fur trader their modern exploiter,

whether he be the Cossack tribute-gatherer of the lower Lena River, or

the factor of the Hudson Bay Company. The assimilation tends to be

ethnic as well as economic, because the severity of the climate excludes

the white woman. The debilitating effects of heat and humidity, aided by

tropical diseases, soon reduce intruding peoples to the dead level of

economic inefficiency characteristic of the native races. These, as the

fittest, survive and tend to absorb the new-comers, pointing to

hybridization as the simplest solution of the problem of tropical

colonization.

[Sidenote: The relation of geography to history.]

The more the comparative method is applied to the study of

history--and this includes a comparison not only of different

countries, but also of successive epochs in the same country--the more

apparent becomes the influence of the soil in which humanity is

rooted, the more permanent and necessary is that influence seen to be.

Geography's claim to make scientific investigation of the physical

conditions of historical events is then vindicated. "Which was there

first, geography or history?" asks Kant. And then comes his answer:

"Geography lies at the basis of history." The two are inseparable.

History takes for its field of investigation human events in various

periods of time; anthropo-geography studies existence in various

regions of terrestrial space. But all historical development takes

place on the earth's surface, and therefore is more or less molded by

its geographic setting. Geography, to reach accurate conclusions, must

compare the operation of its factors in different historical periods

and at different stages of cultural development. It therefore regards

history in no small part as a succession of geographical factors

embodied in events. Back of Massachusetts' passionate abolition

movement, it sees the granite soil and boulder-strewn fields of New

England; back of the South's long fight for the maintenance of

slavery, it sees the rich plantations of tidewater Virginia and the

teeming fertility of the Mississippi bottom lands. This is the

significance of Herder's saying that "history is geography set into

motion." What is to-day a fact of geography becomes to-morrow a factor

of history. The two sciences cannot be held apart without doing

violence to both, without dismembering what is a natural, vital whole.

All historical problems ought to be studied geographically and all

geographic problems must be studied historically. Every map has its

date. Those in the Statistical Atlas of the United States showing the

distribution of population from 1790 to 1890 embody a mass of history

as well as of geography. A map of France or the Russian Empire has a

long historical perspective; and on the other hand, without that map

no change of ethnic or political boundary, no modification in routes

of communication, no system of frontier defences or of colonization,

no scheme of territorial aggrandizement can be understood.

[Sidenote: Multiplicity of geographic factors.]

The study of physical environment as a factor in history was

unfortunately brought into disrepute by extravagant and ill-founded

generalization, before it became the object of investigation according

to modern scientific methods. And even to-day principles advanced in the

name of anthropo-geography are often superficial, inaccurate, based upon

a body of data too limited as to space and time, or couched in terms of

unqualified statement which exposes them to criticism or refutation.

Investigators in this field, moreover, are prone to get a squint in

their eye that makes them see one geographic factor to the exclusion of

the rest; whereas it belongs to the very nature of physical environment

to combine a whole group of influences, working all at the same time

under the law of the resolution of forces. In this plexus of influences,

some operate in one direction and some in another; now one loses its

beneficent effect like a medicine long used or a garment outgrown;

another waxes in power, reinforced by a new geographic factor which has

been released from dormancy by the expansion of the known world, or the

progress of invention and of human development.

[Sidenote: Evolution of geographic relations.]

These complex geographic influences cannot be analyzed and their

strength estimated except from the standpoint of evolution. That is one

reason these half-baked geographic principles rest heavy on our mental

digestion. They have been formulated without reference to the

all-important fact that the geographical relations of man, like his

social and political organization, are subject to the law of

development. Just as the embryo state found in the primitive Saxon tribe

has passed through many phases in attaining the political character of

the present British Empire, so every stage in this maturing growth has

been accompanied or even preceded by a steady evolution of the

geographic relations of the English people.

Owing to the evolution of geographic relations, the physical environment

favorable to one stage of development may be adverse to another, and

_vice versa_. For instance, a small, isolated and protected habitat,

like that of Egypt, Phoenicia, Crete and Greece, encourages the birth

and precocious growth of civilization; but later it may cramp progress,

and lend the stamp of arrested development to a people who were once the

model for all their little world. Open and wind-swept Russia, lacking

these small, warm nurseries where Nature could cuddle her children, has

bred upon its boundless plains a massive, untutored, homogeneous folk,

fed upon the crumbs of culture that have fallen from the richer tables

of Europe. But that item of area is a variable quantity in the equation.

It changes its character at a higher stage of cultural development.

Consequently, when the Muscovite people, instructed by the example of

western Europe, shall have grown up intellectually, economically and

politically to their big territory, its area will become a great

national asset. Russia will come into its own, heir to a long-withheld

inheritance. Many of its previous geographic disadvantages will vanish,

like the diseases of childhood, while its massive size will dwarf many

previous advantages of its European neighbors.

[Sidenote: Evolution of world relations.]

This evolution of geographic relations applies not only to the local

environment, but also to the wider world relations of a people. Greeks

and Syrians, English and Japanese, take a different rank among the

nations of the earth to-day from that held by their ancestors 2,000 years

ago, simply because the world relations of civilized peoples have been

steadily expanding since those far-back days of Tyrian and Athenian

supremacy. The period of maritime discoveries in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries shifted the foci of the world relations of European

states from enclosed seas to the rim of the Atlantic. Venice and Genoa

gave way to Cadiz and Lagos, just as sixteen centuries before Corinth

and Athens had yielded their ascendency to Rome and Ostia. The keen but

circumscribed trade of the Baltic, which gave wealth and historical

preeminence to Lübeck and the other Hanse Towns of northern Germany from

the twelfth to the seventeenth century, lost its relative importance

when the Atlantic became the maritime field of history. Maritime

leadership passed westward from Lübeck and Stralsund to Amsterdam and

Bristol, as the historical horizon widened. England, prior to this

sudden dislocation, lay on the outskirts of civilized Europe, a terminal

land, not a focus. The peripheral location which retarded her early

development became a source of power when she accumulated sufficient

density of population for colonizing enterprises, and when maritime

discovery opened a way to trans-oceanic lands.[9]

Meanwhile, local geographic advantages in the old basins remain the

same, although they are dwarfed by the development of relatively greater

advantages elsewhere. The broken coastline, limited area and favorable

position of Greece make its people to-day a nation of seamen, and enable

them to absorb by their considerable merchant fleet a great part of the

trade of the eastern Mediterranean,[10] just as they did in the days of

Pericles; but that youthful Aegean world which once constituted so large

a part of the _oikoumene_, has shrunken to a modest province, and its

highways to local paths. The coast cities of northern Germany still

maintain a large commerce in the Baltic, but no longer hold the

pre-eminence of the old Hanse Towns. The glory of the Venetian Adriatic

is gone; but that the sea has still a local significance is proven by

the vast sums spent by Austria and Hungary on their hand-made harbors of

Trieste and Fiume.[11] The analytical geographer, therefore, while

studying a given combination of geographic forces, must be prepared for

a momentous readjustment and a new interplay after any marked turning

point in the economic, cultural, or world relations of a people.

[Sidenote: Interplay of geographic factors.]

Skepticism as to the effect of geographic conditions upon human

development is apparently justifiable, owing to the multiplicity of the

underlying causes and the difficulty of distinguishing between stronger

and weaker factors on the one hand, as between permanent and temporary

effects on the other. We see the result, but find it difficult to state

the equation producing this result. But the important thing is to avoid

seizing upon one or two conspicuous geographic elements in the problem

and ignoring the rest. The physical environment of a people consists of

all the natural conditions to which they have been subjected, not merely

a part. Geography admits no single blanket theory. The slow historical

development of the Russian folk has been due to many geographic

causes--to excess of cold and deficiency of rain, an outskirt location

on the Asiatic border of Europe exposed to the attacks of nomadic

hordes, a meager and, for the most part, ice-bound coast which was

slowly acquired, an undiversified surface, a lack of segregated regions

where an infant civilization might be cradled, and a vast area of

unfenced plains wherein the national energies spread out thin and

dissipated themselves. The better Baltic and Black Sea coasts, the

fertility of its Ukraine soil, and location next to wide-awake Germany

along the western frontier have helped to accelerate progress, but the

slow-moving body carried too heavy a drag.

[Sidenote: Land and sea in co-operation.]

The law of the resolutions of forces applies in geography as in the

movement of planets. Failure to recognize this fact often enables

superficial critics of anthropo-geography to make a brave show of

argument. The analysis of these interacting forces and of their various

combinations requires careful investigation. Let us consider the

interplay of the forces of land and sea apparent in every country with

a maritime location. In some cases a small, infertile, niggardly country

conspires with a beckoning sea to drive its sons out upon the deep; in

others a wide territory with a generous soil keeps its well-fed children

at home and silences the call of the sea. In ancient Phoenicia and

Greece, in Norway, Finland, New England, in savage Chile and Tierra del

Fuego, and the Indian coast district of British Columbia and southern

Alaska, a long, broken shoreline, numerous harbors, outlying islands,

abundant timber for the construction of ships, difficult communication

by land, all tempted the inhabitants to a seafaring life. While the sea

drew, the land drove in the same direction. There a hilly or mountainous

interior putting obstacles in the way of landward expansion, sterile

slopes, a paucity of level, arable land, an excessive or deficient

rainfall withholding from agriculture the reward of tillage--some or all

of these factors combined to compel the inhabitants to seek on the sea

the livelihood denied by the land. Here both forces worked in the same

direction.

In England conditions were much the same, and from the sixteenth century

produced there a predominant maritime development which was due not

solely to a long indented coastline and an exceptional location for

participating in European and American trade. Its limited island area,

its large extent of rugged hills and chalky soil fit only for pasturage,

and the lack of a really generous natural endowment,[12] made it slow to

answer the demands of a growing population, till the industrial

development of the nineteenth century exploited its mineral wealth. So

the English turned to the sea--to fish, to trade, to colonize. Holland's

conditions made for the same development. She united advantages of

coastline and position with a small infertile territory, consisting

chiefly of water-soaked grazing lands. When at the zenith of her

maritime development, a native authority estimated that the soil of

Holland could not support more than one-eighth of her inhabitants. The

meager products of the land had to be eked out by the harvest of the

sea. Fish assumed an important place in the diet of the Dutch, and when

a process of curing it was discovered, laid the foundation of Holland's

export trade. A geographical location central to the Baltic and North

Sea countries, and accessible to France and Portugal, combined with a

position at the mouth of the great German rivers made it absorb the

carrying trade of northern Europe.[13] Land and sea coöperated in its

maritime development.

[Sidenote: Land and sea opposed.]

Often the forces of land and sea are directly opposed. If a country's

geographic conditions are favorable to agriculture and offer room for

growth of population, the land forces prevail, because man is primarily

a terrestrial animal. Such a country illustrates what Chisholm, with

Attic nicety of speech, calls "the influence of bread-power on

history,"[14] as opposed to Mahan's sea-power. France, like England, had

a long coastline, abundant harbors, and an excellent location for

maritime supremacy and colonial expansion; but her larger area and

greater amount of fertile soil put off the hour of a redundant

population such as England suffered from even in Henry VIII's time.

Moreover, in consequence of steady continental expansion from the

twelfth to the eighteenth century and a political unification which made

its area more effective for the support of the people, the French of

Richelieu's time, except those from certain districts, took to the sea,

not by national impulse as did the English and Dutch, but rather under

the spur of government initiative. They therefore achieved far less in

maritime trade and colonization.[15] In ancient Palestine, a long

stretch of coast, poorly equipped with harbors but accessible to the

rich Mediterranean trade, failed to offset the attraction of the gardens

and orchards of the Jezreel Valley and the pastures of the Judean hills,

or to overcome the land-born predilections and aptitudes of the

desert-bred Jews. Similarly, the river-fringed peninsulas of Virginia

and Maryland, opening wide their doors to the incoming sea, were

powerless, nevertheless, to draw the settlers away from the riotous

productiveness of the wide tidewater plains. Here again the geographic

force of the land outweighed that of the sea and became the dominant

factor in directing the activities of the inhabitants.

The two antagonistic geographic forces may be both of the land, one born

of a country's topography, the other of its location. Switzerland's

history has for centuries shown the conflict of two political policies,

one a policy of cantonal and communal independence, which has sprung

from the division of that mountainous country into segregated districts,

and the other one of political centralization, dictated by the necessity

for coöperation to meet the dangers of Switzerland's central location

mid a circle of larger and stronger neighbors. Local geographic

conditions within the Swiss territory fixed the national ideal as a

league of "sovereign cantons," to use the term of their constitution,

enjoying a maximum of individual rights and privileges, and tolerating a

minimum of interference from the central authority. Here was physical

dismemberment coupled with mutual political repulsion. But a location at

the meeting place of French, German, Austrian and Italian frontiers laid

upon them the distasteful necessity of union within to withstand

aggressions crowding upon them from without. Hence the growth of the

Swiss constitution since 1798 has meant a fight of the Confederation

against the canton in behalf of general rights, expanding the functions

of the central government, contracting those of canton and commune.[16]

[Sidenote: Local and remote geographic factors.]

Every country forms an independent whole, and as such finds its national

history influenced by its local climate, soil, relief, its location

whether inland or maritime, its river highways, and its boundaries of

mountain, sea, or desert. But it is also a link in a great chain of

lands, and therefore may feel a shock or vibration imparted at the

remotest end. The gradual desiccation of western Asia which took a fresh

start about 2,000 years ago caused that great exodus and displacement of

peoples known as the _Völkerwanderung_, and thus contributed to the

downfall of Rome; it was one factor in the Saxon conquest of Britain and

the final peopling of central Europe. The impact of the Turkish hordes

hurling themselves against the defenses of Constantinople in 1453 was

felt only forty years afterward by the far-off shores of savage America.

Earlier still it reached England as the revival of learning, and it gave

Portugal a shock which started its navigators towards the Cape of Good

Hope in their search for a sea route to India. The history of South

Africa is intimately connected with the Isthmus of Suez. It owes its

Portuguese, Dutch, and English populations to that barrier on the

Mediterranean pathway to the Orient; its importance as a way station on

the outside route to India fluctuates with every crisis in the history

of Suez.

[Sidenote: Direct and indirect effects of environment.]

The geographic factors in history appear now as conspicuous direct

effects of environment, such as the forest warfare of the American

Indian or the irrigation works of the Pueblo tribes, now as a group of

indirect effects, operating through the economic, social and political

activities of a people. These remoter secondary results are often of

supreme importance; they are the ones which give the final stamp to the

national temperament and character, and yet in them the causal

connection between environment and development is far from obvious. They

have, therefore, presented pitfalls to the precipitate theorizer. He has

either interpreted them as the direct effect of some geographic cause

from which they were wholly divorced and thus arrived at conclusions

which further investigation failed to sustain; or seeing no direct and

obvious connection, he has denied the possibility of a generalization.

Montesquieu ascribes the immutability of religion, manners, custom and

laws in India and other Oriental countries to their warm climate.[17]

Buckle attributes a highly wrought imagination and gross superstition to

all people, like those of India, living in the presence of great

mountains and vast plains, knowing Nature only in its overpowering

aspects, which excite the fancy and paralyze reason. He finds, on the

other hand, an early predominance of reason in the inhabitants of a

country like ancient Greece, where natural features are on a small

scale, more comprehensible, nearer the measure of man himself.[18] The

scientific geographer, grown suspicious of the omnipotence of climate

and cautious of predicating immediate psychological effects which are

easy to assert but difficult to prove, approaches the problem more

indirectly and reaches a different solution. He finds that geographic

conditions have condemned India to isolation. On the land side, a great

sweep of high mountains has restricted intercourse with the interior; on

the sea side, the deltaic swamps of the Indus and Ganges Rivers and an

unbroken shoreline, backed by mountains on the west of the peninsula and

by coastal marshes and lagoons on the east, have combined to reduce its

accessibility from the ocean. The effect of such isolation is ignorance,

superstition, and the early crystallization of thought and custom.

Ignorance involves the lack of material for comparison, hence a

restriction of the higher reasoning processes, and an unscientific

attitude of mind which gives imagination free play. In contrast, the

accessibility of Greece and its focal location in the ancient world made

it an intellectual clearing-house for the eastern Mediterranean. The

general information gathered there afforded material for wide

comparison. It fed the brilliant reason of the Athenian philosopher and

the trained imagination which produced the masterpieces of Greek art and

literature.

[Sidenote: Indirect mental effects.]

Heinrich von Treitschke, in his recent "Politik," imitates the direct

inference of Buckle when he ascribes the absence of artistic and poetic

development in Switzerland and the Alpine lands to the overwhelming

aspect of nature there, its majestic sublimity which paralyzes the

mind.[19] He reinforces his position by the fact that, by contrast, the

lower mountains and hill country of Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia,

where nature is gentler, stimulating, appealing, and not overpowering,

have produced many poets and artists. The facts are incontestable. They

reappear in France in the geographical distribution of the awards made

by the Paris _Salon_ of 1896. Judged by these awards, the rough

highlands of Savoy, Alpine Provence, the massive eastern Pyrenees, and

the Auvergne Plateau, together with the barren peninsula of Brittany,

are singularly lacking in artistic instinct, while art nourishes in all

the river lowlands of France. Moreover, French men of letters, by the

distribution of their birthplaces, are essentially products of fluvial

valleys and plains, rarely of upland and mountain.[20]

This contrast has been ascribed to a fundamental ethnic distinction

between the Teutonic population of the lowlands and the Alpine or Celtic

stock which survives in the isolation of highland and peninsula, thus

making talent an attribute of race. But the Po Valley of northern Italy,

whose population contains a strong infusion of this supposedly

stultifying Alpine blood, and the neighboring lowlands and hill country

of Tuscany show an enormous preponderance of intellectual and artistic

power over the highlands of the peninsula.[21] Hence the same contrast

appears among different races under like geographic conditions.

Moreover, in France other social phenomena, such as suicide, divorce,

decreasing birth-rate, and radicalism in politics, show this same

startling parallelism of geographic distribution,[22] and these cannot

be attributed to the stimulating or depressing effect of natural scenery

upon the human mind.

Mountain regions discourage the budding of genius because they are areas

of isolation, confinement, remote from the great currents of men and

ideas that move along the river valleys. They are regions of much labor

and little leisure, of poverty to-day and anxiety for the morrow, of

toil-cramped hands and toil-dulled brains. In the fertile alluvial

plains are wealth, leisure, contact with many minds, large urban centers

where commodities and ideas are exchanged. The two contrasted

environments produce directly certain economic and social results,

which, in turn, become the causes of secondary intellectual and artistic

effects. The low mountains of central Germany which von Treitschke cites

as homes of poets and artists, owing to abundant and varied mineral

wealth, are the seats of active industries and dense populations,[23]

while their low reliefs present no serious obstacle to the numerous

highways across them. They, therefore, afford all conditions for

culture.

[Sidenote: Indirect effects in differentiation of colonial peoples.]

Let us take a different example. The rapid modification in physical and

mental constitution of the English transplanted to North America, South

Africa, Australia and New Zealand has been the result of several

geographic causes working through the economic and social media; but it

has been ascribed by Darwin and others to the effect of climate. The

prevailing energy and initiative of colonists have been explained by the

stimulating atmosphere of their new homes. Even Natal has not escaped

this soft impeachment. But the enterprise of colonials has cropped out,

under almost every condition of heat and cold, aridity and humidity, of

a habitat at sea-level and on high plateau. This blanket theory of

climate cannot, therefore, cover the case. Careful analysis supersedes

it by a whole group of geographic factors working directly and

indirectly. The first of these was the dividing ocean which, prior to

the introduction of cheap ocean transportation and bustling steerage

agents, made a basis of artificial selection. Then it was the man of

abundant energy who, cramped by the narrow environment of a Norwegian

farm or Irish bog, came over to America to take up a quarter-section of

prairie land or rise to the eminence of Boston police sergeant. The

Scotch immigrants in America who fought in the Civil War were nearly two

inches taller than the average in the home country.[24] But the ocean

barrier culled superior qualities of mind and character

also--independence of political and religious conviction, and the

courage of those convictions, whether found in royalist or Puritan,

Huguenot or English Catholic.

[Sidenote: Indirect effect through isolation.]

Such colonists in a remote country were necessarily few and could not be

readily reinforced from home. Their new and isolated geographical

environment favored variation. Heredity passed on the characteristics of

a small, highly selected group. The race was kept pure from intermixture

with the aborigines of the country, owing to the social and cultural

abyss which separated them, and to the steady withdrawal of the natives

before the advance of the whites. The homogeneity of island peoples

seems to indicate that individual variations are in time communicated by

heredity to a whole population under conditions of isolation; and in

this way modifications due to artificial selection and a changed

environment become widely spread.

Nor is this all. The modified type soon becomes established, because the

abundance of land at the disposal of the colonists and the consequent

better conditions of living encourage a rapid increase of population. A

second geographic factor of mere area here begins to operate. Ease in

gaining subsistence, the greater independence of the individual and the

family, emancipation from carking care, the hopeful attitude of mind

engendered by the consciousness of an almost unlimited opportunity and

capacity for expansion, the expectation of large returns upon labor,

and, finally, the profound influence of this hopefulness upon the

national character, all combined, produce a social rejuvenation of the

race. New conditions present new problems which call for prompt and

original solution, make a demand upon the ingenuity and resourcefulness

of the individual, and therefore work to the same end as his previous

removal from the paralyzing effect of custom in the old home country.

Activity is youth and sluggishness or paralysis is age. Hence the

energy, initiative, adaptability, and receptivity to new ideas--all

youthful qualities--which characterize the Anglo-Saxon American as well

as the English Africander, can be traced back to the stimulating

influences, not of a bracing or variable climate, but of the abundant

opportunities offered by a great, rich, unexploited country. Variation

under new natural conditions, when safe-guarded by isolation, tends to

produce modification of the colonial type; this is the direct effect of

a changed environment. But the new economic and social activities of a

transplanted people become the vehicle of a mass of indirect geographic

influences which contribute to the differentiation of the national

character.

[Sidenote: General importance of indirect effects.]

The tendency to overlook such links between conspicuous effects and

their remote, less evident geographic causes has been common in

geographic investigation. This direct rather than indirect approach to

the heart of the problem has led to false inferences or to the

assumption that reliable conclusions were impossible. Environment

influences the higher, mental life of a people chiefly through the

medium of their economic and social life; hence its ultimate effects

should be traced through the latter back to the underlying cause. But

rarely has this been done. Even so astute a geographer as Strabo, though

he recognizes the influence of geographic isolation in differentiating

dialects and customs in Greece,[25] ascribes some national

characteristics to the nature of the country, especially to its climate,

and the others to education and institutions. He thinks that the nature

of their respective lands had nothing to do with making the Athenians

cultured, the Spartans and Thebans ignorant; that the predilection for

natural science in Babylonia and Egypt was not a result of environment

but of the institutions and education of those countries.[26] But here

arise the questions, how far custom and education in their turn depend

upon environment; to what degree natural conditions, molding economic

and political development, may through them fundamentally affect social

customs, education, culture, and the dominant intellectual aptitudes of

a people. It is not difficult to see, back of the astronomy and

mathematics and hydraulics of Egypt, the far off sweep of the rain-laden

monsoons against the mountains of Abyssinia and the creeping of the

tawny Nile flood over that river-born oasis.

[Sidenote: Indirect political and moral effects.]

Plutarch states in his "Solon" that after the rebellion of Kylon in 612

B.C. the Athenian people were divided into as many political factions as

there were physical types of country in Attica. The mountaineers, who

were the poorest party, wanted something like a democracy; the people of

the plains, comprising the greatest number of rich families, were

clamorous for an oligarchy; the coast population of the south,

intermediate both in social position and wealth, wanted something

between the two. The same three-fold division appeared again in 564 B.C.

on the usurpation of Peisistratus.[27] Here the connection between

geographic condition and political opinion is clear enough, though the

links are agriculture and commerce. New England's opposition to the War

of 1812, culminating in the threat of secession of the Hartford

Convention, can be traced back through the active maritime trade to the

broken coastline and unproductive soil of that glaciated country.

In all democratic or representative forms of government permitting free

expression of popular opinion, history shows that division into

political parties tends to follow geographical lines of cleavage. In our

own Civil War the dividing line between North and South did not always

run east and west. The mountain area of the Southern Appalachians

supported the Union and drove a wedge of disaffection into the heart of

the South. Mountainous West Virginia was politically opposed to the

tidewater plains of old Virginia, because slave labor did not pay on the

barren "upright" farms of the Cumberland Plateau; whereas, it was

remunerative on the wide fertile plantations of the coastal lowland. The

ethics of the question were obscured where conditions of soil and

topography made the institution profitable. In the mountains, as also in

New England, a law of diminishing financial returns had for its

corollary a law of increasing moral insight. In this case, geographic

conditions worked through the medium of direct economic effects to more

important political and ethical results.

The roots of geographic influence often run far underground before

coming to the surface, to sprout into some flowering growth; and to

trace this back to its parent stem is the necessary but not easy task of

the geographer.

[Sidenote: Time element.]

The complexity of this problem does not end here. The modification of

human development by environment is a natural process; like all other

natural processes, it involves the cumulative effects of causes

operating imperceptibly but persistently through vast periods of time.

Slowly and deliberately does geography engrave the subtitles to a

people's history. Neglect of this time element in the consideration of

geographic influences accounts equally for many an exaggerated assertion

and denial of their power. A critic undertakes to disprove modification

through physical environment by showing that it has not produced

tangible results in the last fifty or five hundred years. This attitude

recalls the early geologists, whose imaginations could not conceive the

vast ages necessary in a scientific explanation of geologic phenomena.

The theory of evolution has taught us in science to think in larger

terms of time, so that we no longer raise the question whether European

colonists in Africa can turn into negroes, though we do find the recent

amazing statement that the Yankee, in his tall, gaunt figure, "the

colour of his skin, and the formation of his hair, has begun to

differentiate himself from his European kinsman and approach the type of

the aboriginal Indians."[28] Evolution tells the story of modification

by a succession of infinitesimal changes, and emphasizes the permanence

of a modification once produced long after the causes for it cease to

act. The mesas of Arizona, the earth sculpture of the Grand Canyon

remain as monuments to the erosive forces which produced them. So a

habitat leaves upon man no ephemeral impress; it affects him in one way

at a low stage of his development, and differently at a later or higher

stage, because the man himself and his relation to his environment have

been modified in the earlier period; but traces of that earlier

adaptation survive in his maturer life. Hence man's relation to his

environment must be looked at through the perspective of historical

development. It would be impossible to explain the history and national

character of the contemporary English solely by their twentieth century

response to their environment, because with insular conservatism they

carry and cherish vestiges of times when their islands represented

different geographic relations from those of to-day. Witness the

wool-sack of the lord chancellor. We cannot understand the location of

modern Athens, Rome or Berlin from the present day relations of urban

populations to their environment, because the original choice of these

sites was dictated by far different considerations from those ruling

to-day. In the history of these cities a whole succession of geographic

factors have in turn been active, each leaving its impress of which the

cities become, as it were, repositories.

[Sidenote: Effect of a previous habitat.]

The importance of this time element for a solution of

anthropo-geographic problems becomes plainer, where a certain locality

has received an entirely new population, or where a given people by

migration change their habitat. The result in either case is the same, a

new combination, new modifications superimposed on old modifications.

And it is with this sort of case that anthropo-geography most often has

to deal. So restless has mankind been, that the testimony of history and

ethnology is all against the assumption that a social group has ever

been subjected to but one type of environment during its long period of

development from a primitive to a civilized society. Therefore, if we

assert that a people is the product of the country which it inhabits at

a given time, we forget that many different countries which its forbears

occupied have left their mark on the present race in the form of

inherited aptitudes and traditional customs acquired in those remote

ancestral habitats. The Moors of Granada had passed through a wide range

of ancestral experiences; they bore the impress of Asia, Africa and

Europe, and on their expulsion from Spain carried back with them to

Morocco traces of their peninsula life.

A race or tribe develops certain characteristics in a certain region,

then moves on, leaving the old abode but not all the accretions of

custom, social organization and economic method there acquired. These

travel on with the migrant people; some are dropped, others are

preserved because of utility, sentiment or mere habit. For centuries

after the settlement of the Jews in Palestine, traces of their pastoral

life in the grasslands of Mesopotamia could be discerned in their social

and political organization, in their ritual and literature. Survivals of

their nomadic life in Asiatic steppes still persist among the Turks of

Europe, after six centuries of sedentary life in the best agricultural

land of the Balkan Peninsula. One of these appears in their choice of

meat. They eat chiefly sheep and goats, beef very rarely, and swine not

at all.[29] The first two thrive on poor pastures and travel well, so

that they are admirably adapted to nomadic life in arid lands; the last

two, far less so, but on the other hand are the regular concomitant of

agricultural life. The Turk's taste to-day, therefore, is determined by

the flocks and herds which he once pastured on the Trans-Caspian plains.

The finished terrace agriculture and methods of irrigation, which the

Saracens had learned on the mountain sides of Yemen through a schooling

of a thousand years or more, facilitated their economic conquest of

Spain. Their intelligent exploitation of the country's resources for the

support of their growing numbers in the favorable climatic conditions

which Spain offered was a light-hearted task, because of the severe

training which they had had in their Arabian home.

The origin of Roman political institutions is intimately connected with

conditions of the naturally small territory where arose the greatness of

Rome. But now, after two thousand years we see the political impress of

this narrow origin spreading to the governments of an area of Europe

immeasurably larger than the region that gave it birth. In the United

States, little New England has been the source of the strongest

influences modifying the political, religious and cultural life of half

a continent; and as far as Texas and California these influences bear

the stamp of that narrow, unproductive environment which gave to its

sons energy of character and ideals.

[Sidenote: Transplanted religions.]

Ideas especially are light baggage, and travel with migrant peoples

over many a long and rough road. They are wafted like winged seed by the

wind, and strike root in regions where they could never have originated.

Few classes of ideas bear so plainly the geographic stamp of their

origin as religious ones, yet none have spread more widely. The abstract

monotheism sprung from the bare grasslands of western Asia made slow but

final headway against the exuberant forest gods of the early Germans.

Religious ideas travel far from their seedbeds along established lines

of communication. We have the almost amusing episode of the brawny

Burgundians of the fifth century, who received the Arian form of

Christianity by way of the Danube highway from the schools of Athens and

Alexandria, valiantly supporting the niceties of Greek religious thought

against the Roman version of the faith which came up the Rhone Valley.

If the sacred literature of Judaism and Christianity take weak hold upon

the western mind, this is largely because it is written in the symbolism

of the pastoral nomad. Its figures of speech reflect life in deserts and

grasslands. For these figures the western mind has few or vague

corresponding ideas. It loses, therefore, half the import, for instance,

of the Twenty-third Psalm, that picture of the nomad shepherd guiding

his flock across parched and trackless plains, to bring them at evening,

weary, hungry, thirsty, to the fresh pastures and waving palms of some

oasis, whose green tints stand out in vivid contrast to the tawny wastes

of the encompassing sands. "He leadeth me beside the still waters," not

the noisy rushing stream of the rainy lands, but the quiet desert pool

that reflects the stars. What real significance has the tropical

radiance of the lotus flower, the sacred symbol of Buddhism, for the

Mongolian lama in the cold and arid borders of Gobi or the wind-swept

highlands of sterile Tibet? And yet these exotic ideas live on, even if

they no longer bloom in the uncongenial soil. But to explain them in

terms of their present environment would be indeed impossible.

[Sidenote: Partial response to environment]

A people may present at any given time only a partial response to their

environment also for other reasons. This may be either because their

arrival has been too recent for the new habitat to make its influence

felt; or because, even after long residence, one overpowering

geographic factor has operated to the temporary exclusion of all others.

Under these circumstances, suddenly acquired geographic advantages of a

high order or such advantages, long possessed but tardily made available

by the release of national powers from more pressing tasks, may

institute a new trend of historical development, resulting more from

stimulating geographic conditions than from the natural capacities or

aptitudes of the people themselves. Such developments, though often

brilliant, are likely to be short-lived and to end suddenly or

disastrously, because not sustained by a deep-seated national impulse

animating the whole mass of the people. They cease when the first

enthusiasm spends itself, or when outside competition is intensified, or

the material rewards decrease.

[Sidenote: The case of Spain.]

An illustration is found in the mediæval history of Spain. The

intercontinental location of the Iberian Peninsula exposed it to the

Saracen conquest and to the constant reinforcements to Islam power

furnished by the Mohammedanized Berbers of North Africa. For seven

centuries this location was the dominant geographic factor in Spain's

history. It made the expulsion of the Moors the sole object of all the

Iberian states, converted the country into an armed camp, made the

gentleman adventurer and Christian knight the national ideal. It placed

the center of political control high up on the barren plateau of

Castile, far from the centers of population and culture in the river

lowlands or along the coast. It excluded the industrial and commercial

development which was giving bone and sinew to the other European

states. The release of the national energies by the fall of Granada in

1492 and the now ingrained spirit of adventure enabled Spain and

Portugal to utilize the unparalleled advantage of their geographical

position at the junction of the Mediterranean and Atlantic highways, and

by their great maritime explorations in the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries, to become foremost among European colonial powers. But the

development was sporadic, not supported by any widespread national

movement. In a few decades the maritime preëminence of the Iberian

Peninsula began to yield to the competition of the Dutch and English,

who were, so to speak, saturated with their own maritime environment.

Then followed the rapid decay of the sea power of Spain, followed by

that of Portugal, till by 1648 even her coasting trade was in the hands

of the Dutch, and Dutch vessels were employed to maintain communication

with the West Indies.[30]

[Sidenote: Sporadic response to a new environment.]

We have a later instance of sporadic development under the stimulus of

new and favorable geographic conditions, a similar anti-climax. The

expansion of the Russians across the lowlands of Siberia was quite in

harmony with the genius of that land-bred people; but when they reached

Bering Sea, the enclosed basin, the proximity of the American continent,

the island stepping-stones between, and the lure of rich sealskins to

the fur-hunting Cossacks determined a sudden maritime expansion, for

which the Russian people were unfitted. Beginning in 1747, it swept the

coast of Alaska, located its American administrative center first on

Kadiak, then on Baranof Island, and by 1812 placed its southern outposts

on the California coast near San Francisco Bay and on the Farralone

Islands.[31] Russian convicts were employed to man the crazy boats built

of green lumber on the shores of Bering Sea, and Aleutian hunters with

their _bidarkas_ were impressed to catch the seal.[32] The movement was

productive only of countless shipwrecks, many seal skins, and an

opportunity to satisfy an old grudge against England. The territory

gained was sold to the United States in 1867. This is the one instance

in Russian history of any attempt at maritime expansion, and also of any

withdrawal from territory to which the Muscovite power had once

established its claim. This fact alone would indicate that only

excessively tempting geographic conditions led the Russians into an

economic and political venture which neither the previously developed

aptitudes of the people nor the conditions of population and historical

development on the Siberian seaboard were able to sustain.

[Sidenote: The larger conception of the environment.]

The history and culture of a people embody the effects of previous

habitats and of their final environment; but this means something more

than local geographic conditions. It involves influences emanating from

far beyond the borders. No country, no continent, no sea, mountain or

river is restricted to itself in the influence which it either exercises

or receives. The history of Austria cannot be understood merely from

Austrian ground. Austrian territory is part of the Mediterranean

hinterland, and therefore has been linked historically with Rome, Italy,

and the Adriatic. It is a part of the upper Danube Valley and therefore

shares much of its history with Bavaria and Germany, while the lower

Danube has linked it with the Black Sea, Greece, the Russian steppes,

and Asia. The Asiatic Hungarians have pushed forward their ethnic

boundary nearly to Vienna. The Austrian capital has seen the warring

Turks beneath its walls, and shapes its foreign policy with a view to

the relative strength of the Sultan and the Czar.

[Sidenote: Unity of the earth.]

The earth is an inseparable whole. Each country or sea is physically and

historically intelligible only as a portion of that whole. Currents and

wind-systems of the oceans modify the climate of the nearby continents,

and direct the first daring navigations of their peoples. The

alternating monsoons of the Indian Ocean guided Arab merchantmen from

ancient times back and forth between the Red Sea and the Malabar coast

of India.[33] The Equatorial Current and the northeast trade-wind

carried the timid ships of Columbus across the Atlantic to America. The

Gulf Stream and the prevailing westerlies later gave English vessels the

advantage on the return voyage. Europe is a part of the Atlantic coast.

This is a fact so significant that the North Atlantic has become a

European sea. The United States also is a part of the Atlantic coast:

this is the dominant fact of American history. China forms a section of

the Pacific rim. This is the fact back of the geographic distribution of

Chinese emigration to Annam, Tonkin, Siam, Malacca, the Philippines,

East Indies, Borneo, Australia, Hawaiian Islands, the Pacific Coast

States, British Columbia, the Alaskan coast southward from Bristol Bay

in Bering Sea, Ecuador and Peru.

As the earth is one, so is humanity. Its unity of species points to some

degree of communication through a long prehistoric past. Universal

history is not entitled to the name unless it embraces all parts of the

earth and all peoples, whether savage or civilized. To fill the gaps in

the written record it must turn to ethnology and geography, which by

tracing the distribution and movements of primitive peoples can often

reconstruct the most important features of their history.

Anthropo-geographic problems are never simple. They must all be viewed

in the long perspective of evolution and the historical past. They

require allowance for the dominance of different geographic factors at

different periods, and for a possible range of geographic influences

wide as the earth itself. In the investigator they call for pains-taking

analysis and, above all, an open mind.

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

[1] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp.

149-157. New York, 1897.

[2] A.P. Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History, Chap. I.

Boston, 1903.

[3] R.H. Whitbeck, Geographic Influences in the Development of New

Jersey, _Journal of Geography_, Vol. V, No. 6. January, 1908.

[4] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, p. 372. London and New

York, 1902-1906.

[5] Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, 1641-1667. Vol. I, chap.

V and map. London, 1889.

[6] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 305. London, 1905.

[7] Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 464-465, 469.

London, 1883.

[8] _Imperial Gazetteer for India_, Vol. III, p. 109. London, 1885.

[9] G.G. Chisholm, The Relativity of Geographic Advantages, _Scottish

Geog. Mag_., Vol. XIII, No. 9, Sept. 1897.

[10] Hugh Robert Mill, International Geography, p. 347. New York, 1902.

[11] Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 228-230. London, 1903.

[12] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 317-323. London,

1904.

[13] Captain A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 36-38.

Boston, 1902.

[14] G.G. Chisholm, Economic Geography, _Scottish Geog. Mag_., March,

1908.

[15] Captain A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 37-38.

Boston, 1902.

[16] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 123, 124, 145-147.

Philadelphia, 1891.

[17] Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV, chap. IV.

[18] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. I, pp.

86-106.

[19] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik_, Vol. I, p. 225. Leipzig, 1897.

This whole chapter on _Land und Leute_ is suggestive.

[20] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 524-525. New York, 1899.

[21] _Ibid._, 526.

[22] _Ibid._, 517-520, 533-536.

[23] Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 256-257, 268-271. London, 1903.

[24] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 89. New York, 1899.

[25] Strabo, Book VII, chap. I, 2.

[26] Strabo, Book II, chap. III, 7.

[27] Plutarch, Solon, pp. 13, 29, 154.

[28] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 244-245. New York,

1902-1906.

[29] Roscher, _National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues_, p. 33, note 3.

Stuttgart, 1888.

[30] Captain A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 41-42,

50-53. Boston, 1902.

[31] H. Bancroft, History of California, Vol. I, pp. 298, 628-635. San

Francisco.

[32] Agnes Laut, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 64-82. New York, 1905.

[33] Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 351, 470-471.

London, 1883.

CHAPTER II

CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES

Into almost every anthropo-geographical problem the element of

environment enters in different phases, with different modes of

operation and varying degrees of importance. Since the causal conception

of geography demands a detailed analysis of all the relations between

environment and human development, it is advisable to distinguish the

various classes of geographic influences.

[Sidenote: Physical effects.]

Four fundamental classes of effects can be distinguished.

1. The first class includes direct physical effects of environment,

similar to those exerted on plants and animals by their habitat. Certain

geographic conditions, more conspicuously those of climate, apply

certain stimuli to which man, like the lower animals, responds by an

adaption of his organism to his environment. Many physiological

peculiarities of man are due to physical effects of environment, which

doubtless operated very strongly in the earliest stages of human

development, and in those shadowy ages contributed to the

differentiation of races. The unity of the human species is as clearly

established as the diversity of races and peoples, whose divergences

must be interpreted chiefly as modifications in response to various

habitats in long periods of time.

[Sidenote: Variation and natural conditions.]

Such modifications have probably been numerous in the persistent and

unending movements, shiftings, and migrations which have made up the

long prehistoric history of man. If the origin of species is found in

variability and inheritance, variation is undoubtedly influenced by a

change of natural conditions. To quote Darwin, "In one sense the

conditions of life may be said, not only to cause variability, either

directly or indirectly, but likewise to include natural selection, for

the conditions determine whether this or that variety shall survive."[34]

The variability of man does not mean that every external influence

leaves its mark upon him, but that man as an organism, by the

preservation of beneficent variations and the elimination of deleterious

ones, is gradually adapted to his environment, so that he can utilize

most completely that which it contributes to his needs. This

self-maintenance under outward influences is an essential part of the

conception of life which Herbert Spencer defines as the correspondence

between internal conditions and external circumstances, or August Comte

as the harmony between the living being and the surrounding medium or

_milieu_.

According to Virchow, the distinction of races rests upon hereditary

variations, but heredity itself cannot become active till the

characteristic or _Zustand_ is produced which is to be handed down.[35]

But environment determines what variation shall become stable enough to

be passed on by heredity. For instance, we can hardly err in attributing

the great lung capacity, massive chests, and abnormally large torsos of

the Quichua and Aymara Indians inhabiting the high Andean plateaus to

the rarified air found at an altitude of 10,000 or 15,000 feet above sea

level. Whether these have been acquired by centuries of extreme lung

expansion, or represent the survival of a chance variation of undoubted

advantage, they are a product of the environment. They are a serious

handicap when the Aymara Indian descends to the plains, where he either

dies off or leaves descendants with diminishing chests.[36] [See map page

101.]

[Sidenote: Stature and environment]

Darwin holds that many slight changes in animals and plants, such as

size, color, thickness of skin and hair, have been produced through food

supply and climate from the external conditions under which the forms

lived.[37] Paul Ehrenreich, while regarding the chief race distinctions

as permanent forms, not to be explained by external conditions,

nevertheless concedes the slight and slow variation of the sub-race

under changing conditions of food and climate as beyond doubt.[38]

Stature is partly a matter of feeding and hence of geographic condition.

In mountain regions, where the food resources are scant, the varieties

of wild animals are characterized by smaller size in general than are

corresponding species in the lowlands. It is a noticeable fact that

dwarfed horses or ponies have originated in islands, in Iceland, the

Shetlands, Corsica and Sardinia. This is due either to scanty and

unvaried food or to excessive inbreeding, or probably to both. The

horses introduced into the Falkland Islands in 1764 have deteriorated so

in size and strength in a few generations that they are in a fair way to

develop a Falkland variety of pony.[39] On the other hand, Mr. Homer

Davenport states that the pure-bred Arabian horses raised on his New

Jersey stock farm are in the third generation a hand higher than their

grandsires imported from Arabia, and of more angular build. The result

is due to more abundant and nutritious food and the elimination of long

desert journeys.

The low stature of the natives prevailing in certain "misery spots" of

Europe, as in the Auvergne Plateau of southern France, is due in part to

race, in part to a disastrous artificial selection by the emigration of

the taller and more robust individuals, but in considerable part to the

harsh climate and starvation food-yield of that sterile soil; for the

children of the region, if removed to the more fertile valleys of the

Loire and Garonne, grow to average stature.[40] The effect of a scant and

uncertain food supply is especially clear in savages, who have erected

fewer buffers between themselves and the pressure of environment. The

Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert are shorter than their Hottentot kindred

who pasture their flocks and herds in the neighboring grasslands.[41]

Samoyedes, Lapps, and other hyperborean races of Eurasia are shorter

than their more southern neighbors, the physical record of an immemorial

struggle against cold and hunger. The stunted forms and wretched aspect

of the Snake Indians inhabiting the Rocky Mountain deserts distinguished

these clans from the tall buffalo-hunting tribes of the plains.[42] Any

feature of geographic environment tending to affect directly the

physical vigor and strength of a people cannot fail to prove a potent

factor in their history.

[Sidenote: Physical effects of dominant activities.]

Oftentimes environment modifies the physique of a people indirectly by

imposing upon them certain predominant activities, which may develop one

part of the body almost to the point of deformity. This is the effect of

increased use or disuse which Darwin discusses. He attributes the thin

legs and thick arms of the Payaguas Indians living along the Paraguay

River to generations of lives spent in canoes, with the lower

extremities motionless and the arm and chest muscles in constant

exercise.[43] Livingstone found these same characteristics of broad

chests and shoulders with ill-developed legs among the Barotse of the

upper Zambesi;[44] and they have been observed in pronounced form,

coupled with distinctly impaired powers of locomotion, among the

Tlingit, Tsimshean, and Haida Indians of the southern Alaskan and

British Columbia coast, where the geographic conditions of a mountainous

and almost strandless shore interdicted agriculture and necessitated

sea-faring activities.[45] An identical environment has produced a like

physical effect upon the canoemen of Tierra del Fuego[46] and the

Aleutian Islanders, who often sit in their boats twenty hours at a

time.[47] These special adaptations are temporary in their nature and

tend to disappear with change of occupation, as, for instance, among the

Tlingit Indians, who develop improved leg muscles when employed as

laborers in the salmon canneries of British Columbia.

[Sidenote: Effects of climate.]

Both the direct and indirect physical effects of environment thus far

instanced are obvious in themselves and easily explained. Far different

is it with the majority of physical effects, especially those of

climate, whose mode of operation is much more obscure than was once

supposed. The modern geographer does not indulge in the naive hypothesis

of the last century, which assumed a prompt and direct effect of

environment upon the form and features of man. Carl Ritter regarded the

small, slit eyes and swollen lids of the Turkoman as "an obvious effect

of the desert upon the organism." Stanhope Smith ascribed the high

shoulders and short neck of the Tartars of Mongolia to their habit of

raising their shoulders to protect the neck against the cold; their

small, squinting eyes, overhanging brows, broad faces and high cheek

bones, to the effect of the bitter, driving winds and the glare of the

snow, till, he says, "every feature by the action of the cold is harsh

and distorted."[48] These profound influences of a severe climate upon

physiognomy he finds also among the Lapps, northern Mongolians,

Samoyedes and Eskimo.

[Sidenote: Acclimatization]

Most of these problems are only secondarily grist for the geographer's

mill. For instance, when the Aryans descended to the enervating lowlands

of tropical India, and in that debilitating climate lost the qualities

which first gave them supremacy, the change which they underwent was

primarily a physiological one. It can be scientifically described and

explained therefore only by physiologists and physico-chemists; and upon

their investigations the geographer must wait before he approaches the

problem from the standpoint of geographical distribution. Into this

sub-class of physical effects come all questions of acclimatization.[49]

These are important to the anthropo-geographer, just as they are to

colonial governments like England or France, because they affect the

power of national or racial expansion, and fix the historical fate of

tropical lands. The present populations of the earth represent physical

adaptation to their environments. The intense heat and humidity of most

tropical lands prevent any permanent occupation by a native-born

population of pure whites. The catarrhal zone north of the fortieth

parallel in America soon exterminates the negroes.[50]

The Indians of South America, though all fundamentally of the same

ethnic stock, are variously acclimated to the warm, damp, forested

plains of the Amazon; to the hot, dry, treeless coasts of Peru; and to

the cold, arid heights of the Andes. The habitat that bred them tends to

hold them, by restricting the range of climate which they can endure. In

the zone of the Andean slope lying between 4,000 and 6,000 feet of

altitude, which produces the best flavored coffee and which must be

cultivated, the imported Indians from the high plateaus and from the low

Amazon plains alike sicken and die after a short time; so that they take

employment on these coffee plantations for only three or five months,

and then return to their own homes. Labor becomes nomadic on these

slopes, and in the intervals these farm lands of intensive agriculture

show the anomaly of a sparse population only of resident managers.[51]

Similarly in the high, dry Himalayan valley of the upper Indus, over

10,000 feet above sea level, the natives of Ladak are restricted to a

habitat that yields them little margin of food for natural growth of

population but forbids them to emigrate in search of more,--applies at

the same time the lash to drive and the leash to hold, for these

highlanders soon die when they reach the plains.[52] Here are two

antagonistic geographic influences at work from the same environment,

one physical and the other social-economic. The Ladaki have reached an

interesting resolution of these two forces by the institution of

polyandry, which keeps population practically stationary.

[Sidenote: Pigmentation and climate.]

The relation of pigmentation to climate has long interested geographers

as a question of environment; but their speculations on the subject have

been barren, because the preliminary investigations of the physiologist,

physicist and chemist are still incomplete. The general fact of

increasing nigrescence from temperate towards equatorial regions is

conspicuous enough, despite some irregularity of the shading.[53] This

fact points strongly to some direct relation between climate and

pigmentation, but gives no hint how the pigmental processes are

affected. The physiologist finds that in the case of the negro, the dark

skin is associated with a dense cuticle, diminished perspiration,

smaller chests and less respiratory power, a lower temperature and more

rapid pulse,[54] all which variations may enter into the problem of the

negroes coloring. The question is therefore by no means simple.

Yet it is generally conceded by scientists that pigment is a protective

device of nature. The negro's skin is comparatively insensitive to a sun

heat that blisters a white man. Livingstone found the bodies of albino

negroes in Bechuana Land always blistered on exposure to the sun,[55]

and a like effect has been observed among albino Polynesians, and

Melanesians of Fiji.[56] Paul Ehrenreich finds that the degree of

coloration depends less upon annual temperature than upon the direct

effect of the sun's rays; and that therefore a people dwelling in a

cool, dry climate, but exposed to the sun may be darker than another in

a hot, moist climate but living in a dense forest. The forest-dwelling

Botokudos of the upper San Francisco River in Brazil are fairer than the

kindred Kayapo tribe, who inhabit the open campos; and the Arawak of the

Purus River forests are lighter than their fellows in the central Matto

Grosso.[57] Sea-faring coast folk, who are constantly exposed to the

sun, especially in the Tropics, show a deeper pigmentation than their

kindred of the wooded interior.[58] The coast Moros of western Mindanao

are darker than the Subanos, their Malay brethren of the back country,

the lightness of whose color can be explained by their forest life.[59]

So the Duallas of the Kamerun coast of Africa are darker than the

Bakwiri inhabiting the forested mountains just behind them, though both

tribes belong to the Bantu group of people.[60] Here light, in

contradistinction to heat, appears the dominant factor in pigmentation.

A recent theory, advanced by von Schmaedel in 1895, rests upon the

chemical power of light. It holds that the black pigment renders the

negro skin insensitive to the luminous or actinic effects of solar

radiation, which are far more destructive to living protoplasm than the

merely calorific effects.[61]

[Sidenote: Pigmentation and altitude]

Coloration responds to other more obscure influences of environment. A

close connection between pigmentation and elevation above sea level has

been established: a high altitude operates like a high latitude.

Blondness increases appreciably on the higher slopes of the Black

Forest, Vosges Mountains, and Swiss Alps, though these isolated

highlands are the stronghold of the brunette Alpine race.[62] Livi, in

his treatise on military anthropometry, deduced a special action of

mountains upon pigmentation on observing a prevailing increase of

blondness in Italy above the four-hundred meter line, a phenomenon which

came out as strongly in Basilicata and Calabria provinces of the south

as in Piedmont and Lombardy in the north.[63] The dark Hamitic Berbers

of northern Africa have developed an unmistakable blond variant in high

valleys of the Atlas range, which in a sub-tropical region rises to the

height of 12,000 feet. Here among the Kabyles the population is fair;

grey, blue or green eyes are frequent, as is also reddish blond or

chestnut hair.[64] Waitz long ago affirmed this tendency of mountaineers

to lighter coloring from his study of primitive peoples.[65] The

modification can not be attributed wholly to climatic contrast between

mountain and plain. Some other factor, like the economic poverty of the

environment and the poor food-supply, as Livi suggests, has had a hand

in the result; but just what it is or how it has operated cannot yet be

defined.[66]

[Sidenote: Difficulty of Generalization]

Enough has been said to show that the geographer can formulate no broad

generalization as to the relation of pigmentation and climate from the

occurrence of the darkest skins in the Tropics; because this fact is

weakened by the appearance also of lighter tints in the hottest

districts, and of darker ones in arctic and temperate regions. The

geographer must investigate the questions when and where deeper shades

develop in the skins of fair races; what is the significance of dark

skins in the cold zones and of fair ones in hot zones. His answer must

be based largely on the conclusions of physiologists and physicists, and

only when these have reached a satisfactory solution of each detail of

the problem can the geographer summarize the influence of environment

upon pigmentation. The rule can therefore safely be laid down that in

all investigation of geographic influences upon the permanent physical

characteristics of races, the geographic distribution of these should be

left out of consideration till the last, since it so easily

misleads.[67] Moreover, owing to the ceaseless movements of mankind,

these effects do not remain confined to the region that produced them,

but pass on with the wandering throng in whom they have once developed,

and in whom they endure or vanish according as they prove beneficial or

deleterious in the new habitat.

[Sidenote: Psychical effects.]

II. More varied and important are the psychical effects of geographic

environment. As direct effects they are doubtless bound up in many

physiological modifications; and as influences of climate, they help

differentiate peoples and races in point of temperament. They are

reflected in man's religion and his literature, in his modes of thought

and figures of speech. Blackstone states that "in the Isle of Man, to

take away a horse or ox was no felony, but a trespass, because of the

difficulty in that little territory to conceal them or to carry them

off; but to steal a pig or a fowl, which is easily done, was a capital

misdemeanour, and the offender punished with death." The judges or

deemsters in this island of fishermen swore to execute the laws as

impartially "as the herring's backbone doth lie in the middle of the

fish."[68] The whole mythology of the Polynesians is an echo of the

encompassing ocean. The cosmography of every primitive people, their

first crude effort in the science of the universe, bears the impress of

their habitat. The Eskimo's hell is a place of darkness, storm and

intense cold;[69] the Jew's is a place of eternal fire. Buddha, born in

the steaming Himalayan piedmont, fighting the lassitude induced by heat

and humidity, pictured his heaven as Nirvana, the cessation of all

activity and individual life.

[Sidenote: Indirect effect upon language]

Intellectual effects of environment may appear in the enrichment of a

language in one direction to a rare nicety of expression; but this may

be combined with a meager vocabulary in all other directions. The

greatest cattle-breeders among the native Africans, such as the Hereros

of western Damaraland and the Dinkas of the upper White Nile, have an

amazing choice of words for all colors describing their animals--brown,

dun, red, white, dapple, and so on in every gradation of shade and hue.

The Samoyedes of northern Russia have eleven or twelve terms to

designate the various grays and browns of their reindeer, despite their

otherwise low cultural development.[70] The speech of nomads has an

abundance of expressions for cattle in every relation of life. It

includes different words for breeding, pregnancy, death, and

slaughtering in relation to every different kind of domestic animal. The

Magyars, among whom pastoral life still survives on the low plains of

the Danube and Theiss, have a generic word for herd, _csorda_, and

special terms for herds of cattle, horses, sheep, and swine.[71] While

the vocabulary of Malays and Polynesians is especially rich in nautical

terms, the Kirghis shepherd tribes who wander over the highlands of

western Asia from the Tian Shan to the Hindu Kush have four different

terms for four kinds of mountain passes. A _daban_ is a difficult, rocky

defile; an _art_ is very high and dangerous; a _bel_ is a low, easy

pass, and a _kutal_ is a broad opening between low hills.[72]

To such influences man is a passive subject, especially in the earlier

stages of his development; but there are more important influences

emanating from his environment which affect him as an active agent,

challenge his will by furnishing the motives for its exercise, give

purpose to his activities, and determine the direction which they shall

take.[73] These mold his mind and character through the media of his

economic and social life, and produce effects none the less important

because they are secondary. About these anthropo-geography can reach

surer conclusions than regarding direct psychical effects, because it

can trace their mode of operation as well as define the result. Direct

psychical effects are more matters of conjecture, whose causation is

asserted rather than proved. They seem to float in the air, detached

from the solid ground under foot, and are therefore subject matter for

the psychologist rather than the geographer.

[Sidenote: The great man in history.]

What of the great man in this geographical interpretation of history? It

seems to take no account of him, or to put him into the melting-pot with

the masses. Both are to some extent true. As a science,

anthropo-geography can deal only with large averages, and these exclude

or minimize the exceptional individual. Moreover, geographic conditions

which give this or that bent to a nation's purposes and determine its

aggregate activities have a similar effect upon the individual; but he

may institute a far-seeing policy, to whose wisdom only gradually is the

people awakened. The acts of the great man are rarely arbitrary or

artificial; he accelerates or retards the normal course of development,

but cannot turn it counter to the channels of natural conditions. As a

rule he is a product of the same forces that made his people. He moves

with them and is followed by them under a common impulse. Daniel Boone,

that picturesque figure leading the van of the westward movement over

the Allegheny Mountains, was born of his frontier environment and found

a multitude of his kind in that region of backwoods farms to follow him

into the wilderness. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, in the Louisiana

Purchase, carried out the policy of expansion adumbrated in Governor

Spottswood's expedition with the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe over

the Blue Ridge in 1712. Jefferson's daring consummation of the purchase

without government authority showed his community of purpose with the

majority of the people. Peter the Great's location of his capital at St.

Petersburg, usually stigmatized as the act of a despot, was made in

response to natural conditions offering access to the Baltic nations,

just as certainly as ten centuries before similar conditions and

identical advantages led the early Russian merchants to build up a town

at nearby Novgorod, in easy water connection with the Baltic

commerce.[74]

[Sidenote: Economic and social effects.]

III. Geographic conditions influence the economic and social development

of a people by the abundance, paucity, or general character of the

natural resources, by the local ease or difficulty of securing the

necessaries of life, and by the possibility of industry and commerce

afforded by the environment. From the standpoint of production and

exchange, these influences are primarily the subject matter of economic

and commercial geography; but since they also permeate national life,

determine or modify its social structure, condemn it to the dwarfing

effects of national poverty, or open to it the cultural and political

possibilities resident in national wealth, they are legitimate material

also for anthropo-geography.

[Sidenote: Size of the social group.]

They are especially significant because they determine the size of the

social group. This must be forever small in areas of limited resources

or of limited extent, as in the little islands of the world and the yet

smaller oases. The desert of Chinese Turkestan supports, in certain

detached spots of river-born fertility, populations like the 60,000 of

Kashgar, and from this size groups all the way down to the single

families which Younghusband found living by a mere trickle of a stream

flowing down the southern slope of the Tian Shan. Small islands,

according to their size, fertility, and command of trade, may harbor a

sparse and scant population, like the five hundred souls struggling for

an ill-fed existence on the barren Westman Isles of Iceland; or a

compact, teeming, yet absolutely small social group, like that crowding

Malta or the Bermudas. Whether sparsely or compactly distributed, such

groups suffer the limitations inherent in their small size. They are

forever excluded from the historical significance attaching to the

large, continuously distributed populations of fertile continental

lands.

[Sidenote: Effect upon movements of peoples.]

IV. The next class belongs exclusively to the domain of geography,

because it embraces the influence of the features of the earth's surface

in directing the movements and ultimate distribution of mankind. It

includes the effect of natural barriers, like mountains, deserts,

swamps, and seas, in obstructing or deflecting the course of migrating

people and in giving direction to national expansion; it considers the

tendency of river valleys and treeless plains to facilitate such

movements, the power of rivers, lakes, bays and oceans either to block

the path or open a highway, according as navigation is in a primitive or

advanced stage; and finally the influence of all these natural features

in determining the territory which a people is likely to occupy, and the

boundaries which shall separate from their neighbors.

[Sidenote: River routes.]

The lines of expansion followed by the French and English in the

settlement of America and also the extent of territory covered by each

were powerfully influenced by geographic conditions. The early French

explorers entered the great east-west waterway of the St. Lawrence River

and the Great Lakes, which carried them around the northern end of the

Appalachian barrier into the heart of the continent, planted them on the

low, swampy, often navigable watershed of the Mississippi, and started

them on another river voyage of nearly two thousand miles to the Gulf of

Mexico. Here were the conditions and temptation for almost unlimited

expansion; hence French Canada reached to the head of Lake Superior, and

French Louisiana to the sources of the Missouri, To the lot of the

English fell a series of short rivers with fertile valleys, nearly

barred at their not distant sources by a wall of forested mountains, but

separated from one another by low watersheds which facilitated lateral

expansion over a narrow belt between mountains and sea. Here a region of

mild climate and fertile soil suited to agriculture, enclosed by strong

natural boundaries, made for compact settlement, in contrast to the wide

diffusion of the French. Later, when a growing population pressed

against the western barrier, mountain gates opened at Cumberland Gap and

the Mohawk Valley; the Ohio River and the Great Lakes became interior

thoroughfares, and the northwestern prairies lines of least resistance

to the western settler. Rivers played the same part in directing and

expediting this forward movement, as did the Lena and the Amoor in the

Russian advance into Siberia, the Humber and the Trent in the progress

of the Angles into the heart of Britain, the Rhone and Danube in the

march of the Romans into central Europe.

[Sidenote: Segregation and accessibility.]

The geographical environment of a people may be such as to segregate

them from others, and thereby to preserve or even intensify their

natural characteristics; or it may expose them to extraneous influences,

to an infusion of new blood and new ideas, till their peculiarities are

toned down, their distinctive features of dialect or national dress or

provincial customs eliminated, and the people as a whole approach to the

composite type of civilized humanity. A land shut off by mountains or

sea from the rest of the world tends to develop a homogeneous people,

since it limits or prevents the intrusion of foreign elements; or when

once these are introduced, it encourages their rapid assimilation by the

strongly interactive life of a confined locality. Therefore large or

remote islands are, as a rule, distinguished by the unity of their

inhabitants in point of civilization and race characteristics. Witness

Great Britain, Ireland, Japan, Iceland, as also Australia and New

Zealand at the time of their discovery. The highlands of the Southern

Appalachians, which form the "mountain backyards" of Kentucky, Tennessee

and North Carolina, are peopled by the purest English stock in the

United States, descendants of the backwoodsmen of the late eighteenth

century. Difficulty of access and lack of arable land have combined to

discourage immigration. In consequence, foreign elements, including the

elsewhere ubiquitous negro, are wanting, except along the few railroads

which in recent years have penetrated this country. Here survive an

eighteenth century English, Christmas celebrated on Twelfth Night, the

spinning wheel, and a belief in Joshua's power to arrest the course of

the sun.[75]

An easily accessible land is geographically hospitable to all

new-comers, facilitates the mingling of peoples, the exchange of

commodities and ideas. The amalgamation of races in such regions depends

upon the similarity or diversity of the ethnic elements and the duration

of the common occupation. The broad, open valley of the Danube from the

Black Sea to Vienna contains a bizarre mixture of several stocks--Turks,

Bulgarians, various families of pure Slavs, Roumanians, Hungarians, and

Germans. These elements are too diverse and their occupation of the

valley too recent for amalgamation to have advanced very far as yet. The

maritime plain and open river valleys of northern France show a complete

fusion of the native Celts with the Saxons, Franks, and Normans who have

successively drifted into the region, just as the Teutonic and scanter

Slav elements have blended in the Baltic plains from the Elbe to the

Vistula.

[Sidenote: Change of habitat.]

Here are four different classes of geographic influences, all which may

become active in modifying a people when it changes its habitat. Many of

the characteristics acquired in the old home still live on, or at best

yield slowly to the new environment. This is especially true of the

direct physical and psychical effects. But a country may work a prompt

and radical change in the social organization of an immigrant people by

the totally new conditions of economic life which it presents. These may

be either greater wealth or poverty of natural resources than the race

has previously known, new stimulants or deterrents to commerce and

intercourse, and new conditions of climate which affect the efficiency

of the workman and the general character of production. From these a

whole complex mass of secondary effects may follow.

The Aryans and Mongols, leaving their homes in the cool barren highlands

of Central Asia where nature dispensed her gifts with a miserly hand,

and coming down to the hot, low, fertile plains of the Indian rivers,

underwent several fundamental changes in the process of adaptation to

their new environment. An enervating climate did its work in slaking

their energies; but more radical still was the change wrought by the

contrast of poverty and abundance, enforced asceticism and luxury,

presented by the old and new home. The restless, tireless shepherds

became a sedentary, agricultural people; the abstemious nomads,--spare,

sinewy, strangers to indulgence--became a race of rulers, revelling in

luxury, lording it over countless subjects; finally, their numbers

increased rapidly, no longer kept down by the scant subsistence of arid

grasslands and scattered oases.

In a similar way, the Arab of the desert became transformed into the

sedentary lord of Spain. In the luxuriance of field and orchard which

his skilful methods of irrigation and tillage produced, in the growing

predominance of the intellectual over the nomadic military life, of the

complex affairs of city and mart over the simple tasks of herdsman or

cultivator, he lost the benefit of the early harsh training and

therewith his hold upon his Iberian empire. Biblical history gives us

the picture of the Sheik Abraham, accompanied by his nephew Lot, moving

up from the rainless plains of Mesopotamia with his flocks and herds

into the better watered Palestine. There his descendants in the garden

land of Canaan became an agricultural people; and the problem of Moses

and the Judges was to prevent their assimilation in religion and custom

to the settled Semitic tribes about them, and to make them preserve the

ideals born in the starry solitudes of the desert.

[Sidenote: Retrogression in new habitat.]

The change from the nomadic to the sedentary life represents an economic

advance. Sometimes removal to strongly contrasted geographic conditions

necessitates a reversion to a lower economic type of existence. The

French colonists who came to Lower Canada in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries found themselves located in a region of intense

cold, where arable soil was inferior in quality and limited in amount,

producing no staple like the tobacco of Virginia or the wheat of

Maryland or the cotton of South Carolina or the sugar of the West

Indies, by which a young colony might secure a place in European trade.

But the snow-wrapped forests of Canada yielded an abundance of

fur-bearing animals, the fineness and thickness of whose pelts were born

of this frozen north. Into their remotest haunts at the head of Lake

Superior or of Hudson Bay, long lines of rivers and lakes opened level

water roads a thousand miles or more from the crude little colonial

capital at Quebec. And over in Europe beaver hats and fur-trimmed

garments were all the style! So the plodding farmer from Normandy and

the fisherman from Poitou, transferred to Canadian soil, were

irresistibly drawn into the adventurous life of the trapper and

fur-trader. The fur trade became the accepted basis of colonial life;

the _voyageur_ and _courier de bois_, clad in skins, paddling up

ice-rimmed streams in their birch-bark canoes, fraternizing with Indians

who were their only companions in that bleak interior, and married often

to dusky squaws, became assimilated to the savage life about them and

reverted to the lower hunter stage of civilization.[76]

[Sidenote: The Boers of South Africa]

Another pronounced instance of rapid retrogression under new unfavorable

geographic conditions is afforded by the South African Boer. The

transfer from the busy commercial cities of the Rhine mouths to the

far-away periphery of the world's trade, from the intensive agriculture

of small deltaic gardens and the scientific dairy farming of the moist

Netherlands to the semi-arid pastures of the high, treeless _veldt_,

where they were barred from contact with the vivifying sea and its

ship-borne commerce, has changed the enterprising seventeenth century

Hollander into the conservative pastoral Boer. Dutch cleanliness has

necessarily become a tradition to a people who can scarcely find water

for their cattle. The comfort and solid bourgeois elegance of the Dutch

home lost its material equipment in the Great Trek, when the long wagon

journey reduced household furniture to its lowest terms. House-wifely

habits and order vanished in the semi-nomadic life which followed.[77]

The gregarious instinct, bred by the closely-packed population of little

Holland, was transformed to a love of solitude, which in all lands

characterizes the people of a remote and sparsely inhabited frontier. It

is a common saying that the Boer cannot bear to see another man's smoke

from his _stoep_, just as the early Trans-Allegheny pioneer was always

on the move westward, because he could not bear to hear his neighbor's

watch-dog bark. Even the Boer language has deteriorated under the

effects of isolation and a lower status of civilization. The native

_Taal_ differs widely from the polished speech of Holland; it preserves

some features of the High Dutch of two centuries ago, but has lost

inflexions and borrowed words for new phenomena from the English,

Kaffirs and Hottentots; can express no abstract ideas, only the concrete

ideas of a dull, work-a-day world.[78]

The new habitat may eliminate many previously acquired characteristics

and hence transform a people, as in the case of the Boers; or it may

intensify tribal or national traits, as in the seafaring propensities of

the Angles and Saxons when transferred to Britain, and of the

seventeenth century English when transplanted to the indented coasts of

New England; or it may tolerate mere survival or the slow dissuetude of

qualities which escape any particular pressure in the new environment,

and which neither benefit nor handicap in the modified struggle for

existence.

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

[34] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. V, p. 166. New York, 1895.

[35] E. Virchow, _Rassenbildung und Erblichkeit_, Bastian

Festschrift, pp. 14, 43, 44. Berlin, 1896.

[36] Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 34-35. New York, 1899.

[37] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. I, pp. 8-9. New York, 1895.

[38] P. Ehrenreich, _Die Urbewohner Brasiliens_, p. 30. Braunschweig,

1897.

[39] Ratzel, _Die Erde und das Leben_, Vol. I, pp. 364, 365. Leipzig and

Vienna, 1901.

[40] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 79-86, 96, 100. New York, 1899.

[41] T. Waitz, Anthropology, pp. 57-58. Edited by J.F. Collingwood.

London, 1863.

[42] Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, pp.

198-200, 219. Philadelphia, 1853.

[43] Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 33. New York, 1899.

[44] D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, p. 266. New York, 1858.

[45] Alaska, _Eleventh Census Report_, pp. 54, 56. Washington, 1893, and

Albert P. Niblack, The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern

British Columbia, p. 237. Washington, 1888.

[46] Fitz-Roy, Voyage of the Beagle, Vol. II, pp. 130-132, 137, 138.

London, 1839.

[47] H. Bancroft, Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 88-89. San Francisco, 1886.

[48] S. Stanhope Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion

and Figure in the Human Species, pp. 103-110. New Brunswick and New

York, 1810.

[49] For full discussion see A.R. Wallace's article on acclimatization

in Encyclopedia Britanica, and W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe. Chap. XXI.

New York, 1899.

[50] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 39-41. Philadelphia, 1901.

[51] Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 34-35. New York, 1899.

[52] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 137-138. London, 1897.

[53] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 58-71, Map. New York, 1898.

[54] _Ibid._, p. 566. D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 29-30.

Philadelphia, 1901.

[55] D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, p. 607. New York, 1858.

[56] Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, p. 83, New York, 1859.

[57] P. Ehrenreich, _Die Urbewohner Brasiliens_, p. 32. Braunschweig,

1897.

[58] T. Waitz, Anthropology, pp. 46-49. Edited by Collingwood, London,

1863.

[59] _Philippine Census_, Vol. I, p. 552. Washington, 1903.

[60] F. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 106. London, 1908.

[61] Major Charles E. Woodruff, The Effect of Tropical Light on the

White Man, New York, 1905, is a suggestive but not convincing discussion

of the theory.

[62] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 74-77. New York, 1899.

[63] Quoted in G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, p. 73. London and New

York, 1901.

[64] _Ibid._, pp. 63-69, 74-75.

[65] T. Waitz, Anthropology, pp. 44-45. Edited by J.F. Collingwood,

London, 1863.

[66] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 76. New York, 1899.

[67] For able discussion, see Topinard, Anthropology, pp. 385-392. Tr.

from French, London, 1894.

[68] J. Johnson, Jurisprudence of the Isle of Man, pp. 44, 71.

Edinburgh, 1811.

[69] Charles F. Hall, Arctic Researches and Life among the Eskimo, p.

571. New York, 1866. Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo, _Sixth Annual

Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_, pp. 588-590. Washington, 1888.

[70] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 35. London, 1896-1898.

[71] Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues_, p. 34, note 8.

Stuttgart, 1888.

[72] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants, _Asia_, Vol. I, p.

171. New York, 1895.

[73] Alfred Hettner, _Die Geographie des Menschen_, pp. 409-410 in

_Geographische Zeitschrift_, Vol. XIII, No. 8. Leipzig, 1907.

[74] S.B. Boulton, The Russian Empire, pp. 60-64. London, 1882.

[75] E.C. Semple, The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains, _The

Geographical Journal_, Vol. XVII, No. 6, pp. 588-623. London, 1901.

[76] E.C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp.

25-31. Boston, 1903. The Influence of Geographic Environment on the

Lower St. Lawrence, Bull. _Amer. Geog. Society_, Vol. XXXVI, p. 449-466.

New York, 1904.