Influences of Geographic Environment | Page 5

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