Influences of Geographic Environment | Page 8

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."