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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Density Of Population In Eastern Hemisphere

Density Of Population In Western Hemisphere

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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 Fuego46 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Every clan, tribe, state or nation includes two ideas, a people and its land, the first unthinkable without the other. History, sociology, ethnology touch only the inhabited areas of the earth. These areas gain their final significance because of the people who occupy them; their local conditions of climate, soil, natural resources, physical features and geographic situation are important primarily as factors in the development of actual or possible inhabitants. A land is fully comprehended only when studied in the light of its influence upon its people, and a people cannot be understood apart from the field of its activities. More than this, human activities are fully intelligible only in relation to the various geographic conditions which have stimulated them in different parts of the world. The principles of the evolution of navigation, of agriculture, of trade, as also the theory of population, can never reach their correct and final statement, unless the data for the conclusions are drawn from every part of the world, and each fact interpreted in the light of the local conditions whence it sprang. Therefore anthropology, sociology and history should be permeated by geography.

In history, the question of territory,—by which is meant mere area in contrast to specific geographic conditions—has constantly come to the front, because a state obviously involved land and boundaries, and assumed as its chief function the defence and extension of these. Therefore political geography developed early as an offshoot of history. Political science has often formulated its principles without regard to the geographic conditions of states, but as a matter of fact, the most fruitful political policies of nations have almost invariably had a geographic core. Witness the colonial policy of Holland, England, France and Portugal, the free-trade policy of England, the militantism of Germany, the whole complex question of European balance of power and the Bosporus, and the Monroe Doctrine of the United States. Dividing lines between political parties tend to follow approximately geographic lines of cleavage; and these make themselves apparent at recurring intervals of national upheaval, perhaps with, centuries between, like a submarine volcanic rift. In England the southeastern plain and the northwestern uplands have been repeatedly arrayed against each other, from the Roman conquest which embraced the lowlands up to about the 500-foot contour line,79 through the War of the Roses and the Civil War,80 to the struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the great Reform Bill of 1832.81 Though the boundary lines have been only roughly the same and each district has contained opponents of the dominant local party, nevertheless the geographic core has been plain enough.

The land is a more conspicuous factor in the history of states than in the history of society, but not more necessary and potent. Wars, which constitute so large a part of political history, have usually aimed more or less directly at acquisition or retention of territory; they have made every petty quarrel the pretext for mulcting the weaker nation of part of its land. Political maps are therefore subject to sudden and radical alterations, as when France's name was wiped off the North American continent in 1763, or when recently Spain's sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere was obliterated. But the race stocks, languages, customs, and institutions of both France and Spain remained after the flags had departed. The reason is that society is far more deeply rooted in the land than is a state, does not expand or contract its area so readily. Society is always, in a sense, adscripta glebae; an expanding state which incorporates a new piece of territory inevitably incorporates its inhabitants, unless it exterminates or expels them. Yet because racial and social geography changes slowly, quietly and imperceptibly, like all those fundamental processes which we call growth, it is not so easy and obvious a task to formulate a natural law for the territorial relations of the various hunter, pastoral nomadic, agricultural, and industrial types of society as for those of the growing state.

Most systems of sociology treat man as if he were in some way detached from the earth's surface; they ignore the land basis of society. The anthropo-geographer recognizes the various social forces, economic and psychologic, which sociologists regard as the cement of societies; but he has something to add. He sees in the land occupied by a primitive tribe or a highly organized state the underlying material bond holding society together, the ultimate basis of their fundamental social activities, which are therefore derivatives from the land. He sees the common territory exercising an integrating force,—weak in primitive communities where the group has established only a few slight and temporary relations with its soil, so that this low social complex breaks up readily like its organic counterpart, the low animal organism found in an amoeba; he sees it growing stronger with every advance in civilization involving more complex relations to the land,—with settled habitations, with increased density of population, with a discriminating and highly differentiated use of the soil, with the exploitation of mineral resources, and finally with that far-reaching exchange of commodities and ideas which means the establishment of varied extra-territorial relations. Finally, the modern society or state has grown into every foot of its own soil, exploited its every geographic advantage, utilized its geographic location to enrich itself by international trade, and when possible, to absorb outlying territories by means of colonies. The broader this geographic base, the richer, more varied its resources, and the more favorable its climate to their exploitation, the more numerous and complex are the connections which the members of a social group can establish with it, and through it with each other; or in other words, the greater may be its ultimate historical significance. The polar regions and the subtropical deserts, on the other hand, permit man to form only few and intermittent relations with any one spot, restrict economic methods to the lower stages of development, produce only the small, weak, loosely organized horde, which never evolves into a state so long as it remains in that retarding environment.

Man in his larger activities, as opposed to his mere physiological or psychological processes, cannot be studied apart from the land which he inhabits. Whether we consider him singly or in a group—family, clan, tribe or state—we must always consider him or his group in relation to a piece of land. The ancient Irish sept, Highland clan, Russian mir, Cherokee hill-town, Bedouin tribe, and the ancient Helvetian canton, like the political state of history, have meant always a group of people and a bit of land. The first presupposes the second. In all cases the form and size of the social group, the nature of its activities, the trend and limit of its development will be strongly influenced by the size and nature of its habitat. The land basis is always present, in spite of Morgan's artificial distinction between a theoretically landless societas, held together only by the bond of common blood, and the political civitas based upon land.82 Though primitive society found its conscious bond in common blood, nevertheless the land bond was always there, and it gradually asserted its fundamental character with the evolution of society.

The savage and barbarous groups which in Morgan's classification would fall under the head of societas have nevertheless a clear conception of their ownership of the tribal lands which they use in common. This idea is probably of very primitive origin, arising from the association of a group with its habitat, whose food supply they regard as a monopoly.83 This is true even of migratory hunting tribes. They claim a certain area whose boundaries, however, are often ill-defined and subject to fluctuations, because the lands are not held by permanent occupancy and cultivation. An exceptional case is that of the Shoshone Indians, inhabiting the barren Utah basin and the upper valleys of the Snake and Salmon Rivers, who are accredited with no sense of ownership of the soil. In their natural state they roved about in small, totally unorganized bands or single families, and changed their locations so widely, that they seemed to lay no claim to any particular portion. The hopeless sterility of the region and its poverty of game kept its destitute inhabitants constantly on the move to gather in the meager food supply, and often restricted the social group to the family.84 Here the bond between land and tribe, and hence between the members of the tribe, was the weakest possible.

The usual type of tribal ownership was presented by the Comanches, nomadic horse Indians who occupied the grassy plains of northern Texas. They held their territory and the game upon it as the common property of the tribe, and jealously guarded the integrity of their domain.85 The chief Algonquin tribes, who occupied the territory between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, had each its separate domain, within which it shifted its villages every few years; but its size depended upon the power of the tribe to repel encroachment upon its hunting grounds. Relying mainly on the chase and fishing, little on agriculture, for their subsistence, their relations to their soil were superficial and transitory, their tribal organization in a high degree unstable.86 Students of American ethnology generally agree that most of the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi were occupying definite areas at the time of the discovery, and were to a considerable extent sedentary and agricultural. Though nomadic within the tribal territory, as they moved with the season in pursuit of game, they returned to their villages, which were shifted only at relatively long intervals.87

The political organization of the native Australians, low as they were in the social scale, seems to have been based chiefly on the claim of each wretched wandering tribe to a definite territory.88 In north central Australia, where even a very sparse population has sufficed to saturate the sterile soil, tribal boundaries have become fixed and inviolable, so that even war brings no transfer of territory. Land and people are identified. The bond is cemented by their primitive religion, for the tribe's spirit ancestors occupied this special territory.89 In a like manner a very definite conception of tribal ownership of land prevails among the Bushmen and Bechuanas of South Africa; and to the pastoral Hereros the alienation of their land is inconceivable.90 [See map page 105.]

A tribe of hunters can never be more than a small horde, because the simple, monotonous savage economy permits no concentration of population, no division of labor except that between the sexes, and hence no evolution of classes. The common economic level of all is reflected in the simple social organization,91 which necessarily has little cohesion, because the group must be prepared to break up and scatter in smaller divisions, when its members increase or its savage supplies decrease even a little. Such primitive groups cannot grow into larger units, because these would demand more roots sent down into the sustaining soil; but they multiply by fission, like the infusorial monads, and thereafter lead independent existences remote from each other. This is the explanation of multiplication of dialects among savage tribes.

Fishing tribes have their chief occupation determined by their habitats, which are found along well stocked rivers, lakes, or coastal fishing grounds. Conditions here encourage an early adoption of sedentary life, discourage wandering except for short periods, and facilitate the introduction of agriculture wherever conditions of climate and soil permit. Hence these fisher folk develop relatively large and permanent social groups, as testified by the ancient lake-villages of Switzerland, based upon a concentrated food-supply resulting from a systematic and often varied exploitation of the local resources. The coöperation and submission to a leader necessary in pelagic fishing often gives the preliminary training for higher political organization.92 All the primitive stocks of the Brazilian Indians, except the mountain Ges, are fishermen and agriculturists; hence their annual migrations are kept within narrow limits. Each linguistic group occupies a fixed and relatively well defined district.93 Stanley found along the Congo large permanent villages of the natives, who were engaged in fishing and tilling the fruitful soil, but knew little about the country ten miles back from the river. These two generous means of subsistence are everywhere combined in Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia: there they are associated with dense populations and often with advanced political organization, as we find it in the feudal monarchy of Tonga and the savage Fiji Islands.94 Fisher tribes, therefore, get an early impulse forward in civilization;95 and even where conditions do not permit the upward step to agriculture, these tribes have permanent relations with their land, form stable social groups, and often utilize their location on a natural highway to develop systematic trade. For instance, on the northwest coast of British Columbia and Southern Alaska, the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshean Indians have portioned out all the land about their seaboard villages among the separate families or households as hunting, fishing, and berrying grounds. These are regarded as private property and are handed down from generation to generation. If they are used by anyone other than the owner, the privilege must be paid for. Every salmon stream has its proprietor, whose summer camp can be seen set up at the point where the run of the fish is greatest. Combined with this private property in land there is a brisk trade up and down the coast, and a tendency toward feudalism in the village communities, owing to the association of power and social distinction with wealth and property in land.96

Among pastoral nomads, among whom a systematic use of their territory begins to appear, and therefore a more definite relation between land and people, we find a more distinct notion than among wandering hunters of territorial ownership, the right of communal use, and the distinct obligation of common defense. Hence the social bond is drawn closer. The nomad identifies himself with a certain district, which belongs to his tribe by tradition or conquest, and has its clearly defined boundaries. Here he roams between its summer and winter pastures, possibly one hundred and fifty miles apart, visits its small arable patches in the spring for his limited agricultural ventures, and returns to them in the fall to reap their meager harvest. Its springs, streams, or wells assume enhanced value, are things to be fought for, owing to the prevailing aridity of summer; while ownership of a certain tract of desert or grassland carries with it a certain right in the bordering settled district as an area of plunder.97

The Kara-Kirghis stock, who have been located since the sixteenth century on Lake Issik-Kul, long ago portioned out the land among the separate families, and determined their limits by natural features of the landscape.98 Sven Hedin found on the Tarim River poles set up to mark the boundary between the Shah-yar and Kuchar tribal pastures.99 John de Plano Carpini, traveling over southern Russia in 1246, immediately after the Tartar conquest, found that the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural rivers were all boundaries between domains of the various millionaries or thousands, into which the Tartar horde was organized.100 The population of this vast country was distributed according to the different degrees of fertility and the size of the pastoral groups.101 Volney observed the same distinction in the distribution of the Bedouins of Syria. He found the barren cantons held by small, widely scattered tribes, as in the Desert of Suez; but the cultivable cantons, like the Hauran and the Pachalic of Aleppo, closely dotted by the encampments of the pastoral owners.102

The large range of territory held by a nomadic tribe is all successively occupied in the course of a year, but each part only for a short period of time. A pastoral use of even a good district necessitates a move of five or ten miles every few weeks. The whole, large as it may be, is absolutely necessary for the annual support of the tribe. Hence any outside encroachment upon their territory calls for the united resistance of the tribe. This joint or social action is dictated by their common interest in pastures and herds. The social administration embodied in the apportionment of pastures among the families or clans grows out of the systematic use of their territory, which represents a closer relation between land and people than is found among purely hunting tribes. Overcrowding by men or livestock, on the other hand, puts a strain upon the social bond. When Abraham and Lot, typical nomads, returned from Egypt to Canaan with their large flocks and herds, rivalry for the pastures occasioned conflicts among their shepherds, so the two sheiks decided to separate. Abraham took the hill pastures of Judea, and Lot the plains of Jordan near the settled district of Sodom.103

The larger the amount of territory necessary for the support of a given number of people, whether the proportion be due to permanent poverty of natural resources as in the Eskimo country, or to retarded economic development as among the Indians of primitive America or the present Sudanese, the looser is the connection between land and people, and the lower the type of social organization. For such groups the organic theory of society finds an apt description. To quote Spencer, "The original clusters, animal and social, are not only small, but they lack density. Creatures of low type occupy large spaces considering the small quantity of animal substance they contain; and low-type societies spread over areas that are wide relatively to the number of their component individuals."104 In common language this means small tribes or even detached families sparsely scattered over wide areas, living in temporary huts or encampments of tepees and tents shifted from place to place, making no effort to modify the surface of the land beyond scratching the soil to raise a niggardly crop of grain or tubers, and no investment of labor that might attach to one spot the sparse and migrant population. [See density maps pages 8 and 9.]

The superiority over this social type of the civilized state lies in the highly organized utilization of its whole geographic basis by the mature community, and in the development of government that has followed the increasing density of population and multiplication of activities growing out of this manifold use of the land. Sedentary agriculture, which forms its initial economic basis, is followed by industrialism and commerce. The migratory life presents only limited accumulation of capital, and restricts narrowly its forms. Permanent settlement encourages accumulation in every form, and under growing pressure of population slowly reveals the possibilities of every foot of ground, of every geographic advantage. These are the fibers of the land which become woven into the whole fabric of the nation's life. These are the geographic elements constituting the soil in which empires are rooted; they rise in the sap of the nation.

The geographic basis of a state embodies a whole complex of physical conditions which may influence its historical development. The most potent of these are its size and zonal location; its situation, whether continental or insular, inland or maritime, on the open ocean or an enclosed sea; its boundaries, whether drawn by sea, mountain, desert or the faint demarking line of a river; its forested mountains, grassy plains, and arable lowlands; its climate and drainage system; finally its equipment with plant and animal life, whether indigenous or imported, and its mineral resources. When a state has taken advantage of all its natural conditions, the land becomes a constituent part of the state,105 modifying the people which inhabit it, modified by them in turn, till the connection between the two becomes so strong by reciprocal interaction, that the people cannot be understood apart from their land. Any attempt to divide them theoretically reduces the social or political body to a cadaver, valuable for the study of structural anatomy after the method of Herbert Spencer, but throwing little light upon the vital processes.

A people who makes only a transitory or superficial use of its land has upon it no permanent or secure hold. The power to hold is measured by the power to use; hence the weak tenure of hunting and pastoral tribes. Between their scattered encampments at any given time are wide interstices, inviting occupation by any settlers who know how to make better use of the soil. This explains the easy intrusion of the English colonists into the sparsely tenanted territory of the Indians, of the agricultural Chinese into the pasture lands of the Mongols beyond the Great Wall, of the American pioneers into the hunting grounds of the Hudson Bay Company in the disputed Oregon country.106 The frail bonds which unite these lower societies to their soil are easily ruptured and the people themselves dislodged, while their land is appropriated by the intruder. But who could ever conceive of dislodging the Chinese or the close-packed millions of India? A modern state with a given population on a wide area is more vulnerable than another of like population more closely distributed; but the former has the advantage of a reserve territory for future growth.107 This was the case of Kursachsen and Brandenburg in the sixteenth century, and of the United States throughout its history. But beside the danger of inherent weakness before attack, a condition of relative underpopulation always threatens a retardation of development. Easy-going man needs the prod of a pressing population. [Compare maps pages 8 and 103 for examples.]

Food is the urgent and recurrent need of individuals and of society. It dictates their activities in relation to their land at every stage of economic development, fixes the locality of the encampment or village, and determines the size of the territory from which sustenance is drawn. The length of residence in one place depends upon whether the springs of its food supply are perennial or intermittent, while the abundance of their flow determines how large a population a given piece of land can support.

Hunter and fisher folk, relying almost exclusively upon what their land produces of itself, need a large area and derive from it only an irregular food supply, which in winter diminishes to the verge of famine. The transition to the pastoral stage has meant the substitution of an artificial for a natural basis of subsistence, and therewith a change which more than any other one thing has inaugurated the advance from savagery to civilization.108 From the standpoint of economics, the forward stride has consisted in the application of capital in the form of flocks and herds to the task of feeding the wandering horde;109 from the standpoint of alimentation, in the guarantee of a more reliable and generally more nutritious food supply, which enables population to grow more steadily and rapidly; from the standpoint of geography, in the marked reduction in the per capita amount of land necessary to yield an adequate and stable food supply. Pastoral nomadism can support in a given district of average quality from ten to twenty times as many souls as can the chase; but in this respect is surpassed from twenty to thirty-fold by the more productive agriculture. While the subsistence of a nomad requires 100 to 200 acres of land, for that of a skillful farmer from 1 to 2 acres suffice.110 In contrast, the land of the Indians living in the Hudson Bay Territory in 1857 averaged 10 square miles per capita; that of the Indians in the United States in 1825, subsidized moreover by the government, 1-1/4 square miles.111

With transition to the sedentary life of agriculture, society makes a further gain over nomadism in the closer integration of its social units, due to permanent residence in larger and more complex groups; in the continuous release of labor from the task of mere food-getting for higher activities, resulting especially in the rapid evolution of the home; and finally in the more elaborate organization in the use of the land, leading to economic differentiation of different localities and to a rapid increase in the population supported by a given area, so that the land becomes the dominant cohesive force in society. [See maps pages 8 and 9.]

Agriculture is adopted at first on a small scale as an adjunct to the chase or herding. It tends therefore to partake of the same extensive and nomadic character112 as these other methods of gaining subsistence, and only gradually becomes sedentary and intensive. Such was the superficial, migratory tillage of most American Indians, shifting with the village in the wake of the retreating game or in search of fresh unexhausted soil. Such is the agriculture of the primitive Korkus in the Mahadeo Hills in Central India. They clear a forested slope by burning; rake over the ashes in which they sow their grain, and reap a fairly good crop in the fertilized soil. The second year the clearing yields a reduced product and the third year is abandoned. When the hamlet of five or six families has exhausted all the land about it, it moves to a new spot to repeat the process.113

The same superficial, extensive tillage, with abandonment of fields every few years, prevails in the Tartar districts of the Russian steppes, as it did among the cattle-raising Germans at the beginning of their history. Tacitus says of them, Arva per annos mutant et superest ager,114 commenting at the same time upon their abundance of land and their reluctance to till. Where nomadism is made imperative by aridity, the agriculture which accompanies it tends to become fixed, owing to the few localities blessed with an irrigating stream to moisten the soil. These spots, generally selected for the winter residence, have their soil enriched, moreover, by the long stay of the herd and thus avoid exhaustion.115 Often, however, in enclosed basins the salinity of the irrigating streams in their lower course ruins the fields after one or two crops, and necessitates a constant shifting of the cultivated patches; hence agriculture remains subsidiary to the yield of the pastures. This condition and effect is conspicuous along the termini of the streams draining the northern slope of the Kuen Lun into the Tarim basin.116

The desultory, intermittent, extensive use of the land practised by hunters and nomads tends, under the growing pressure of population, to pass into the systematic, continuous, intensive use practised by the farmer, except where nature presents positive checks to the transition. The most obvious check consists in adverse conditions of climate and soil. Where agriculture meets insurmountable obstacles, like the intense cold of Arctic Siberia and Lapland, or the alkaline soils of Nevada and the Caspian Depression, or the inadequate rainfall of Mongolia and Central Arabia, the land can produce no higher economic and social groups than pastoral hordes. Hence shepherd folk are found in their purest types in deserts and steppes, where conditions early crystallized the social form and checked development. [Rainfall map chap. XIV.]

Adverse conditions of climate and soil are not the only factors in this retardation. The very unequal native equipment of the several continents with plant and animal forms likely to accelerate the advance to nomadism and agriculture also enters into the equation. In Australia, the lack of a single indigenous mammal fit for domestication and of all cereals blocked from the start the pastoral and agricultural development of the natives. Hence at the arrival of the Europeans, Australia presented the unique spectacle of a whole continent with its population still held in the vise of nature. The Americas had a limited variety of animals susceptible of domestication, but were more meagerly equipped than the Old World. Yet the Eskimo failed to tame and herd the reindeer, though their precarious food-supply furnished a motive for the transition. Moreover, an abundance of grass and reindeer moss (Cladonia rangiferina), and congenial climatic conditions favored it especially for the Alaskan Eskimo, who had, besides, the nearby example of the Siberian Chukches as reindeer herders.117 The buffalo, whose domesticability has been proved, was never utilized in this way by the Indians, though the Spaniard Gomara writes of one tribe, living in the sixteenth century in the southwestern part of what is now United States territory, whose chief wealth consisted in herds of tame buffalo.118 North America, at the time of the discovery, saw only the dog hanging about the lodges of the Indians; but in South America the llama and alpaca, confined to the higher levels of the Andes (10,000 to 15,000 feet elevation) were used in domestic herds only in the mountain-rimmed valleys of ancient Peru, where, owing to the restricted areas of these intermontane basins, stock-raising early became stationary,119 as we find it in the Alps. Moreover, the high ridges of the Andes supported a species of grass called ichu, growing up to the snowline from the equator to the southern extremity of Patagonia. Its geographical distribution coincided with that of the llama and alpaca, whose chief pasturage it furnished.120 In contrast, the absence of any wild fodder plants in Japan, and the exclusion of all foreign forms by the successful competition of the native bamboo grass have together eliminated pastoral life from the economic history of the island.

The Old World, on the other hand, furnished an abundant supply of indigenous animals susceptible of domestication, and especially those fitted for nomadic life, such as the camel, horse, ass, sheep and goat. Hence it produced in the widespread grasslands and deserts of Europe, Asia, and Africa the most perfect types of pastoral development in its natural or nomadic form. Moreover, the early history of the civilized agricultural peoples of these three continents reveals their previous pastoral mode of life.

North and South America offered over most of their area conditions of climate and soil highly favorable to agriculture, and a fair list of indigenous cereals, tubers, and pulses yielding goodly crops even to superficial tillage. Maize especially was admirably suited for a race of semi-migratory hunters. It could be sown without plowing, ripened in a warm season even in ninety days, could be harvested without a sickle and at the pleasure of the cultivator, and needed no preparation beyond roasting before it was ready for food.121 The beans and pumpkins which the Indians raised also needed only a short season. Hence many Indian tribes, while showing no trace of pastoral development, combined with the chase a semi-nomadic agriculture; and in a few districts where geographic conditions had applied peculiar pressure, they had accomplished the transition to sedentary agriculture.

Every advance to a higher state of civilization has meant a progressive decrease in the amount of land necessary for the support of the individual, and a progressive increase in the relations between man and his habitat. The stage of social development remaining the same, the per capita amount of land decreases also from poorer to better endowed geographical districts, and with every invention which brings into use some natural resource. The following classification122 illustrates the relation of density of population to various geographic and socio-economic conditions.

Hunter tribes on the outskirts of the habitable area, as in Arctic America and Siberia, require from 70 to 200 square miles per capita; in arid lands, like the Kalahari Desert and Patagonia, 40 to 200 square miles per capita; in choice districts and combining with the chase some primitive agriculture, as did the Cherokee, Shawnee and Iroquois Indians, the Dyaks of Borneo and the Papuans of New Guinea, 1/2 to 2 square miles per capita.

Pastoral nomads show a density of from 2 to 5 to the square mile; practicing some agriculture, as in Kordofan and Sennar districts of eastern Sudan, 10 to 15 to the square mile. Agriculture, undeveloped but combined with some trade and industry as in Equatorial Africa, Borneo and most of the Central American states, supports 5 to 15 to the square mile; practised with European methods in young or colonial lands, as in Arkansas, Texas, Minnesota, Hawaii, Canada and Argentine, or in European lands with unfavorable climate, up to 25 to the square mile.

Pure agricultural lands of central Europe support 100 to the square mile, and those of southern Europe, 200; when combining some industry, from 250 to 300. But these figures rise to 500 or more in lowland India and China. Industrial districts of modern Europe, such as England, Belgium, Saxony, Departments Nord and Rhone in France, show a density of 500 to 800 to the square mile. [See maps pages 8 and 9.]

With every increase of the population inhabiting a given area, and with the consequent multiplication and constriction of the bonds uniting society with its land, comes a growing necessity for a more highly organized government, both to reduce friction within and to secure to the people the land on which and by which they live. Therefore protection becomes a prime function of the state. It wards off outside attack which may aim at acquisition of its territory, or an invasion of its rights, or curtailment of its geographic sphere of activity. The modern industrial state, furthermore, with the purpose of strengthening the nation, assists or itself undertakes the construction of highways, canals, and railroads, and the maintenance of steamship lines. These encourage the development of natural resources and of commerce, and hence lay the foundation for an increased population, by multiplying the relations between land and people.

A like object is attained by territorial expansion, which often follows in the wake of commercial expansion. This strengthens the nation positively by enlarging its geographic base, and negatively by forcing back the boundaries of its neighbors. The expansion of the Thirteen Colonies from the Atlantic slope to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes by the treaty concluding the Revolution was a strong guarantee of the survival of the young Republic against future aggressions either of England or Spain, though it exchanged the scientific or protecting boundary of the Appalachian Mountains for the unscientific and exposed boundary of a river. The expansion to the Rocky Mountains by the Louisiana purchase not only gave wider play to national energies, stimulated natural increase of population, and attracted immigration, but it eliminated a dangerous neighbor in the French, and placed a wide buffer of untenanted land between the United States and the petty aggressions of the Spanish in Mexico. Rome's expansion into the valley of the Po, as later into Trans-Alpine Gaul and Germany, had for its purpose the protection of the peninsula against barbarian inroads. Japan's recent aggression against the Russians in the Far East was actuated by the realization that she had to expand into Korea at the cost of Muscovite ascendency, or contract later at the cost of her own independence.

If a state lacks the energy and national purpose, like Italy, or the possibility, like Switzerland, for territorial expansion, and accepts its boundaries as final, the natural increase of population upon a fixed area produces an increased density, unless certain social forces counteract it. Without these forces, the relation of men to the land would have tended to modify everywhere in the same way. Increase in numbers would have been attended by a corresponding decrease in the amount of land at the disposal of each individual. Those states which, like Norway and Switzerland, cannot expand and which have exploited their natural resources to the utmost, must resign themselves to the emigration of their redundant population. But those which have remained within their own boundaries and have adopted a policy of isolation, like China, feudal Japan during its two and a half centuries of seclusion, and numerous Polynesian islands, have been forced to war with nature itself by checking the operation of the law of natural increase. All the repulsive devices contributing to this end, whether infanticide, abortion, cannibalism, the sanctioned murder of the aged and infirm, honorable suicide, polyandry or persistent war, are the social deformities consequent upon suppressed growth. Such artificial checks upon population are more conspicuous in natural regions with sharply defined boundaries, like islands and oases, as Malthus observed;123 but they are visible also among savage tribes whose boundaries are fixed not by natural features but by the mutual repulsion and rivalry characterizing the stage of development, and whose limit of population is reduced by their low economic status.

There is a great difference between those states whose inhabitants subsist exclusively from the products of their own country and those which rely more or less upon other lands. Great industrial states, like England and Germany, which derive only a portion of their food and raw material from their own territory, supply their dense populations through international trade. Interruption of such foreign commerce is disastrous to the population at home; hence the state by a navy protects the lines of communication with those far-away lands of wheat fields and cattle ranch. This is no purely modern development. Athens in the time of Pericles used her navy not only to secure her political domination in the Aegean, but also her connections with the colonial wheat lands about the Euxine.

The modern state strives to render this circle of trade both large and permanent by means of commercial treaties, customs-unions, trading-posts and colonies. Thus while society at home is multiplying its relations with its own land, the state is enabling it to multiply also its relations with the whole producing world. While at home the nation is becoming more closely knit together through the common bond of the fatherland, in the world at large humanity is evolving a brotherhood of man by the union of each with all through the common growing bond of the earth. Hence we cannot avoid the question: Are we in process of evolving a social idea vaster than that underlying nationality? Do the Socialists hint to us the geographic basis of this new development, when they describe themselves as an international political party?

It is natural that the old philosophy of history should have fixed its attention upon the geographic basis of historical events. Searching for the permanent and common in the outwardly mutable, it found always at the bottom of changing events the same solid earth. Biology has had the same experience. The history of the life forms of the world leads always back to the land on which that life arose, spread, and struggled for existence. The philosophy of history was superior to early sociology, in that its method was one of historical comparison, which inevitably guided it back to the land as the material for the first generalization. Thus it happens that the importance of the land factor in history was approached first from the philosophical side. Montesquieu and Herder had no intention of solving sociological and geographical problems, when they considered the relation of peoples and states to their soil; they wished to understand the purpose and destiny of man as an inhabitant of the earth.

The study of history is always, from one standpoint, a study of progress. Yet after all the century-long investigation of the history of every people working out its destiny in its given environment, struggling against the difficulties of its habitat, progressing when it overcame them and retrograding when it failed, advancing when it made the most of its opportunities and declining when it made less or succumbed to an invader armed with better economic or political methods to exploit the land, it is amazing how little the land, in which all activities finally root, has been taken into account in the discussion of progress. Nevertheless, for a theory of progress it offers a solid basis. From the standpoint of the land social and political organizations, in successive stages of development, embrace ever increasing areas, and make them support ever denser populations; and in this concentration of population and intensification of economic development they assume ever higher forms. It does not suffice that a people, in order to progress, should extend and multiply only its local relations to its land. This would eventuate in arrested development, such as Japan showed at the time of Perry's visit. The ideal basis of progress is the expansion of the world relations of a people, the extension of its field of activity and sphere of influence far beyond the limits of its own territory, by which it exchanges commodities and ideas with various countries of the world. Universal history shows us that, as the geographical horizon of the known world has widened from gray antiquity to the present, societies and states have expanded their territorial and economic scope; that they have grown not only in the number of their square miles and in the geographical range of their international intercourse, but in national efficiency, power, and permanence, and especially in that intellectual force which feeds upon the nutritious food of wide comparisons. Every great movement which has widened the geographical outlook of a people, such as the Crusades in the Middle Ages, or the colonization of the Americas, has applied an intellectual and economic stimulus. The expanding field of advancing history has therefore been an essential concomitant and at the same time a driving force in the progress of every people and of the world.

Since progress in civilization involves an increasing exploitation of natural advantages and the development of closer relations between a land and its people, it is an erroneous idea that man tends to emancipate himself more and more from the control of the natural conditions forming at once the foundation and environment of his activities. On the contrary, he multiplies his dependencies upon nature;124 but while increasing their sum total, he diminishes the force of each. There lies the gist of the matter. As his bonds become more numerous, they become also more elastic. Civilization has lengthened his leash and padded his collar, so that it does not gall; but the leash is never slipped. The Delaware Indians depended upon the forests alone for fuel. A citizen of Pennsylvania, occupying the former Delaware tract, has the choice of wood, hard or soft coal, coke, petroleum, natural gas, or manufactured gas. Does this mean emancipation? By no means. For while fuel was a necessity to the Indian only for warmth and cooking, and incidentally for the pleasureable excitement of burning an enemy at the stake, it enters into the manufacture of almost every article that the Pennsylvanian uses in his daily life. His dependence upon nature has become more far-reaching, though less conspicuous and especially less arbitrary.

These dependencies increase enormously both in variety and amount. Great Britain, with its twenty thousand merchant ships aggregating over ten million tons, and its immense import and export trade, finds its harbors vastly more important to-day for the national welfare than in Cromwell's time, when they were used by a scanty mercantile fleet. Since the generation of electricity by water-power and its application to industry, the plunging falls of the Scandinavian Mountains, of the Alps of Switzerland, France, and Italy, of the Southern Appalachians and the Cascade Range, are geographical features representing new and unsuspected forms of national capital, and therefore new bonds between land and people in these localities. Russia since 1844 has built 35,572 miles (57,374 kilometers) of railroad in her European territory, and thereby derived a new benefit from her level plains, which so facilitate the construction and cheap operation of railroads, that they have become in this aspect alone a new feature in her national economy. On the other hand, the galling restrictions of Russia's meager and strategically confined coasts, which tie her hand in any wide maritime policy, work a greater hardship to-day than they did a hundred years ago, since her growing population creates a more insistent demand for international trade. In contrast to Russia, Norway, with its paucity of arable soil and of other natural resources, finds its long indented coastline and the coast-bred seamanship of its people a progressively important national asset. Hence as ocean-carriers the Norwegians have developed a merchant marine nearly half as large again as that of Russia and Finland combined—1,569,646 tons125 as against 1,084,165 tons.

This growing dependence of a civilized people upon its land is characterized by intelligence and self-help. Man forms a partnership with nature, contributing brains and labor, while she provides the capital or raw material in ever more abundant and varied forms. As a result of this coöperation, held by the terms of the contract, he secures a better living than the savage who, like a mendicant, accepts what nature is pleased to dole out, and lives under the tyranny of her caprices.

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

The ethnic and political boundaries of Europe to-day are the residuum of countless racial, national, tribal and individual movements reaching back into an unrecorded past. The very names of Turkey, Bulgaria, England, Scotland and France are borrowed from intruding peoples. New England, New France, New Scotland or Nova Scotia and many more on the American continents register the Trans-Atlantic nativity of their first white settlers. The provinces of Galicia in Spain, Lombardy in Italy, Brittany in France, Essex and Sussex in England record in their names streams of humanity diverted from the great currents of the Völkerwanderung. The Romance group of languages, from Portugal to Roumania, testify to the sweep of expanding Rome, just as the wide distribution of the Aryan linguistic family points to many roads and long migrations from some unplaced birthplace. Names like Cis-Alpine and Trans-Alpine Gaul in the Roman Empire, Trans-Caucasia, Trans-Caspia and Trans-Baikalia in the Russian Empire, the Transvaal and Transkei in South Africa, indicate the direction whence the advancing people have come.

Ethnology reveals an east and west stratification of linguistic groups in Europe, a north and south stratification of races, and another stratification by altitude, which reappears in all parts of the world, and shows certain invading dominant races occupying the lowlands and other displaced ones the highlands. This definite arrangement points to successive arrivals, a crowding forward, an intrusion of the strong into fertile, accessible valleys and plains, and a dislodgment of the weak into the rough but safe keeping of mountain range or barren peninsula, where they are brought to bay. Ethnic fragments, linguistic survivals, or merely place names, dropped like discarded baggage along the march of a retreating army, bear witness everywhere to tragic recessionals.

Every country whose history we examine proves the recipient of successive streams of humanity. Even sea-girt England has received various intruding peoples from the Roman occupation to the recent influx of Russian Jews. In prehistoric times it combined several elements in its population, as the discovery of the "long barrow" men and "round barrow" men by archaeologists, and the identification of a surviving Iberian or Mediterranean strain by ethnologists go to prove.126 Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India tell the same story, whether in their recorded or unrecorded history. Tropical Africa lacks a history; but all that has been pieced together by ethnologists and anthropologists, in an effort to reconstruct its past, shows incessant movement,—growth, expansion and short-lived conquest, followed by shrinkage, expulsion or absorption by another invader.127 To this constant shifting of races and peoples the name of historical movement has been given, because it underlies most of written history, and constitutes the major part of unwritten history, especially that of savage and nomadic tribes. Two things are vital in the history of every people, its ethnic composition and the wars it wages in defense or extension of its boundaries. Both rest upon historical movements,—intrusions, whether peaceful or hostile, into its own land, and encroachments upon neighboring territory necessitated by growth. Back of all such movements is natural increase of population beyond local means of subsistence, and the development of the war spirit in the effort to secure more abundant subsistence either by raid or conquest of territory.

Among primitive peoples this movement is simple and monotonous. It involves all members of the tribe, either in pursuit of game, or following the herd over the tribal territory, or in migrations seeking more and better land. Among civilized peoples it assumes various forms, and especially is differentiated for different members of the social group. The civilized state develops specialized frontiersmen, armies, explorers, maritime traders, colonists, and missionaries, who keep a part of the people constantly moving and directing external expansion, while the mass of the population converts the force once expended in the migrant food-quest into internal activity. Here we come upon a paradox. The nation as a whole, with the development of sedentary life, increases its population and therewith its need for external movements; it widens its national area and its circle of contact with other lands, enlarges its geographical horizon, and improves its internal communication over a growing territory; it evolves a greater mobility within and without, which attaches, however, to certain classes of society, not to the entire social group. This mobility becomes the outward expression of a whole complex of economic wants, intellectual needs, and political ambitions. It is embodied in the conquests which build up empires, in the colonization which develops new lands, in the world-wide exchange of commodities and ideas which lifts the level of civilization, till this movement of peoples becomes a fundamental fact of history.

This movement is and has been universal and varied. When most unobtrusive in its operation, it has produced its greatest effects. To seize upon a few conspicuous migrations, like the Völkerwanderung and the irruption of the Turks into Europe, made dramatic by their relation to the declining empires of Rome and Constantinople, and to ignore the vast sum of lesser but more normal movements which by slow increments produce greater and more lasting results, leads to wrong conclusions both in ethnology and history. Here, as in geology, great effects do not necessarily presuppose vast forces, but rather the steady operation of small ones. It is often assumed that the world was peopled by a series of migrations; whereas everything indicates that humanity spread over the earth little by little, much as the imported gypsy moth is gradually occupying New England or the water hyacinth the rivers of Florida. Louis Agassiz observed in 1853 that "the boundaries within which the different natural combinations of animals are known to be circumscribed upon the surface of the earth, coincide with the natural range of distinct types of man."128 The close parallelism between Australian race and flora, Eskimo race and Arctic fauna, points to a similar manner of dispersion. Wallace, in describing how the Russian frontier of settlement slowly creeps forward along the Volga, encroaching upon the Finnish and Tartar areas, and permeating them with Slav blood and civilization, adds that this is probably the normal method of expansion.129 Thucydides describes the same process of encroachment, displacement, and migration in ancient Hellas.130 Strabo quotes Posidonius as saying that the emigration of the Cimbrians and other kindred tribes from their native seats was gradual and by no means sudden.131 The traditions of the Delaware Indians show their advance from their early home in central Canada southward to the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay to have been a slow zigzag movement, interrupted by frequent long halts, leaving behind one laggard group here and sending out an offshoot there, who formed new tribes and thereby diversified the stock.132 It was an aimless wandering, without destination and purpose other than to find a pleasanter habitat. The Vandals appear first as "a loose aggregation of restless tribes who must not be too definitely assigned to any precise district on the map," somewhere in central or eastern Prussia.133 Far-reaching migrations aiming at a distant goal, like the Gothic and Hunnish conquests of Italy, demand both a geographical knowledge and an organization too high for primitive peoples, and therefore belong to a later period of development.134

The long list of recorded migrations has been supplemented by the researches of ethnologists, which have revealed a multitude of prehistoric movements. These are disclosed in greater number and range with successive investigation. The prehistoric wanderings of the Polynesians assume far more significance to-day than a hundred years ago, when their scope was supposed to have its western limit at Fiji and the Ellice group. They have now been traced to almost every island of Melanesia; vestiges of their influence have been detected in the languages of Australia, and the culture of the distant coasts of Alaska and British Columbia. The western pioneers of America knew the Shoshone Indians as small bands of savages, constantly moving about in search of food in the barren region west of the Rocky Mountains, and occasionally venturing eastward to hunt buffalo on the plains. Recent investigation has identified as offshoots of this retarded Shoshonean stock the sedentary agriculturalists of the Moqui Pueblo, and the advanced populations of ancient Mexico and Central America.135 Here was a great human current which through the centuries slowly drifted from the present frontier of Canada to the shores of Lake Nicaragua. Powell's map of the distribution of the linguistic stocks of American Indians is intelligible only in the light of constant mobility. Haebler's map of the South American stocks reveals the same restless past. This cartographical presentation of the facts, giving only the final results, suggests tribal excursions of the nature of migrations; but ethnologists see them as the sum total of countless small movements which are more or less part of the normal activity of an unrooted savage people. [Map page 101.]

Otis Mason finds that the life of a social group involves a variety of movements characterized by different ranges or scopes. I. The daily round from bed to bed. II. The annual round from year to year, like that of the Tunguse Orochon of Siberia who in pursuit of various fish and game change their residence within their territory from month to month, or the pastoral nomads who move with the seasons from pasture to pasture. III. Less systematic outside movements covering the tribal sphere of influence, such as journeys or voyages to remote hunting or fishing grounds, forays or piratical descents upon neighboring lands eventuating usually in conquest, expansion into border regions for occasional occupation or colonization. IV. Participation in streams of barter or commerce. V. And at a higher stage in the great currents of human intercourse, experience, and ideas, which finally compass the world.136 In all this series the narrower movement prepares for the broader, of which it constitutes at once an impulse and a part.

The real character and importance of these movements have been appreciated by broad-minded historians. Thucydides elucidates the conditions leading up to the Peloponnesian War by a description of the semi-migratory population of Hellas, the exposure of the more fertile districts to incursions, and the influence of these movements in differentiating Dorian from Ionian Greece.137 Johannes von Muller, in the introduction to his history of Switzerland, assigns to federations and migrations a conspicuous rôle in historical development. Edward A. Ross sees in such movements a thorough-going selective process which weeds out the unfit, or rather spares only the highly fit. He lays down the principle that repeated migrations tend to the creation of energetic races of men. He adds, "This principle may account for the fact that those branches of a race achieve the most brilliant success which have wandered the farthest from their ancestral home.... The Arabs and Moors that skirted Africa and won a home in far-away Spain, developed the most brilliant of the Saracen civilizations. Hebrews, Dorians, Quirites, Rajputs, Hovas were far invaders. No communities in classic times flourished like the cities of Asia created by the overflow from Greece. Nowhere under the Czar are there such vigorous, progressive communities as in Siberia."138 Brinton distinguishes the associative and dispersive elements in ethnography. The latter is favored by the physical adaptability of the human race to all climates and external conditions; it is stimulated by the food-quest, the pressure of foes, and the resultant restlessness of an unstable primitive society.139

The earth's surface is at once factor and basis in these movements. In an active way it directs them; but they in turn clothe the passive earth with a mantle of humanity. This mantle is of varied weave and thickness, showing here the simple pattern of a primitive society, there the intricate design of advanced civilization; here a closely woven or a gauzy texture, there disclosing a great rent where a rocky peak or the ice-wrapped poles protrude through the warm human covering. This is the magic web whereof man is at once woof and weaver, and the flying shuttle that never rests. Given a region, what is its living envelope, asks anthropo-geography. Whence and how did it get there? What is the material of warp and woof? Will new threads enter to vary the color and design? If so, from what source? Or will the local pattern repeat itself over and over with dull uniformity?

It was the great intellectual service of Copernicus that he conceived of a world in motion instead of a world at rest. So anthropo-geography must see its world in motion, whether it is considering English colonization, or the westward expansion of the Southern slave power in search of unexhausted land, or the counter expansion of the free-soil movement, or the early advance of the trappers westward to the Rockies after the retreating game, or the withdrawal thither of the declining Indian tribes before the protruding line of white settlement, and their ultimate confinement to ever shrinking reservations. In studying increase of population, it sees in Switzerland chalet and farm creeping higher up the Alp, as the lapping of a rising tide of humanity below; it sees movement in the projection of a new dike in Holland to reclaim from the sea the land for another thousand inhabitants, movement in Japan's doubling of its territory by conquest, in order to house and feed its redundant millions.

The whole complex relation of unresting man to the earth is the subject matter of anthropo-geography. The science traces his movements on the earth's surface, measures their velocity, range, and recurrence, determines their nature by the way they utilize the land, notes their transformation at different stages of economic development and under different environments. Just as an understanding of animal and plant geography requires a previous knowledge of the various means of dispersal, active and passive, possessed by these lower forms of life, so anthropo-geography must start with a study of the movements of mankind.

First of all is to be noted an evolution in the mobility of peoples. In the lower stages of culture mobility is great. It is favored by the persistent food-quest over wide areas incident to retarded economic methods, and by the loose attachment of society to the soil. The small social groups peculiar to these stages and their innate tendency to fission help the movements to ramify. The consequent scattered distribution of the population offers wide interstices between encampments or villages, and into these vacant spaces other wandering tribes easily penetrate. The rapid decline of the Indian race in America before the advancing whites was due chiefly to the division of the savages into small groups, scattered sparsely over a wide territory. Hunter and pastoral peoples need far more land than they can occupy at any one time. Hence the temporarily vacant spots invite incursion. Moreover, the slight impedimenta carried by primitive folk minimize the natural physical obstacles which they meet when on the march. The lightly equipped war parties of the Shawnee Indians used gorges and gaps for the passage of the Allegheny Mountains which were prohibitive to all white pioneers except the lonely trapper. Finally, this mobility gets into the primitive mind. The Wanderlust is strong. Long residence in one territory is irksome, attachment is weak. Therefore a small cause suffices to start the whole or part of the social body moving. A temporary failure of the food supply, cruelty or excessive exaction of tribute on the part of the chief, occasions an exodus. The history of every negro tribe in Africa gives instances of such secessions, which often leave whole districts empty and exposed to the next wandering occupant. Methods of preventing such withdrawals, and therewith the diminution of his treasury receipts and his fighting force, belong to the policy of every negro chieftain.

The checks to this native mobility of primitive peoples are two: physical and mental. In addition to the usual barriers of mountains, deserts, and seas before the invention of boats, primeval forests have always offered serious obstacles to man armed only with stone or bronze axe, and they rebuffed even man of the iron age. War and hunting parties had to move along the natural clearings of the rivers, the tracks of animals, or the few trails beaten out in time by the natives themselves. Primitive agriculture has never battled successfully against the phalanx of the trees. Forests balked the expansion of the Inca civilization on the rainy slope of the Andes, and in Central Africa the negro invaded only their edges for his yam fields and plantain groves. The earliest settlements in ancient Britain were confined to the natural clearings of the chalk downs and oolitic uplands; and here population was chiefly concentrated even at the close of the Roman occupation. Only gradually, as the valley woodlands were cleared, did the richer soil of the alluvial basins attract men from the high, poor ground where tillage required no preliminary work. But after four centuries of Roman rule and Roman roads, the clearings along the river valleys were still mere strips of culture mid an encompassing wilderness of woods. When the Germanic invaders came, they too appropriated the treeless downs and were blocked by the forests.140 On the other hand, grasslands and savannahs have developed the most mobile people whom we know, steppe hunters like the Sioux Indians and Patagonians. Thus while the forest dweller, confined to the highway of the stream, devised only canoe and dugout boat in various forms for purposes of transportation, steppe peoples of the Old World introduced the use of draft and pack animals, and invented the sledge and cart.

Primitive peoples carry a drag upon their migrations in their restricted geographical outlook; ignorance robs them of definite goals. The evolution of the historical movement is accelerated by every expansion of the geographical horizon. It progresses most rapidly where the knowledge of outlying or remote lands travels fastest, as along rivers and thalassic coasts. Rome's location as toll-gate keeper of the Tiber gave her knowledge of the upstream country and directed her conquest of its valley; and the movement thus started gathered momentum as it advanced. Cæsar's occupation of Gaul meant to his generation simply the command of the roads leading from the Mediterranean to the northern sources of tin and amber, and the establishment of frontier outposts to protect the land boundaries of Italy; this represented a bold policy of inland expansion for that day. The modern historian sees in that step the momentous advance of history beyond the narrow limits of the Mediterranean basin, and its gradual inclusion of all the Atlantic countries of Europe, through whose maritime enterprise the historical horizon was stretched to include America. In the same way, mediæval trade with the Orient, which had familiarized Europe with distant India and Cathay, developed its full historico-geographical importance when it started the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth century. The expansion of the geographical horizon in 1512 to embrace the earth inaugurated a widespread historical movement, which has resulted in the Europeanization of the world.

Civilized man is at once more and less mobile than his primitive brother. Every advance in civilization multiplies and tightens the bonds uniting him with his soil; makes him a sedentary instead of a migratory being. On the other hand every advance in civilization is attended by the rapid clearing of the forests, by the construction of bridges and interlacing roads, the invention of more effective vehicles for transportation whereby intercourse increases, and the improvement of navigation to the same end. Civilized man progressively modifies the land which he occupies, removes or reduces obstacles to intercourse, and thereby approximates it to the open plain. Thus far he facilitates movements. But while doing this he also places upon the land a dense population, closely attached to the soil, strong to resist incursion, and for economic reasons inhospitable to any marked accession of population from without. Herein lies the great difference between migration in empty or sparsely inhabited regions, such as predominated when the world was young, and in the densely populated countries of our era. As the earth grew old and humanity multiplied, peoples themselves became the greatest barriers to any massive migrations, till in certain countries of Europe and Asia the historical movement has been reduced to a continual pressure, resulting in compression of population here, repression there. Hence, though political boundaries may shift, ethnic boundaries scarcely budge. The greatest wars of modern Europe have hardly left a trace upon the distribution of its peoples. Only in the Balkan Peninsula, as the frontiers of the Turkish Empire have been forced back from the Danube, the alien Turks have withdrawn to the shrinking territory of the Sultan and especially to Asia Minor.

Where a population too great to be dislodged occupies the land, conquest results in the eventual absorption of the victors and their civilization by the native folk, as happened to the Lombards in Italy, the Vandals in Africa and the Normans in England. Where the invaders are markedly superior in culture though numerically weak, conquest results in the gradual permeation of the conquered with the religion, economic methods, language, and customs of the new-comers.141 The latter process, too, is always attended by some intermixture of blood, where no race repulsion exists, but this is small in comparison to the diffusion of civilization. This was the method by which Greek traders and colonists Hellenized the countries about the eastern Mediterranean, and spread their culture far back from the shores which their settlements had appropriated. In this way Saracen armies soon after the death of Mohammed Arabized the whole eastern and southern sides of the Mediterranean from Syria to Spain, and Arab merchants set the stamp of their language and religion on the coasts of East Africa as far as Moçambique. The handful of Spanish adventurers who came upon the relatively dense populations of Mexico and Peru left among them a civilization essentially European, but only a thin strain of Castilian blood. Thus the immigration of small bands of people sufficed to influence the culture of that big territory known as Latin America.

That vast sum of migrations, great and small, which we group under the general term of historical movement has involved an endless mingling of races and cultures. As Professor Petrie has remarked, the prevalent notion that in prehistoric times races were pure and unmixed is without foundation. An examination of the various forms of the historical movement reveals the extent and complexity of this mingling process.

In the first place, no migration is ever simple; it involves a number of secondary movements, each of which in turn occasions a new combination of tribal or racial elements. The transference of a whole people from its native or adopted seat to a new habitat, as in the Völkerwanderungen, empties the original district, which then becomes a catchment basin for various streams of people about its rim; and in the new territory it dislodges a few or all of the occupants, and thereby starts up a fresh movement as the original one comes to rest.

Nor is this all. A torrent that issues from its source in the mountains is not the river which reaches the sea. On its long journey from highland to lowland it receives now the milky waters of a glacier-fed stream, now a muddy tributary from agricultural lands, now the clear waters from a limestone plateau, while all the time its racing current bears a burden of soil torn from its own banks. Now it rests in a lake, where it lays down its weight of silt, then goes on, perhaps across an arid stretch where its water is sucked up by the thirsty air or diverted to irrigate fields of grain. So with those rivers of men which we call migrations. The ethnic stream may start comparatively pure, but it becomes mixed on the way. From time to time it leaves behind laggard elements which in turn make a new racial blend where they stop. Such were the six thousand Aduatici whom Cæsar found in Belgian Gaul. These were a detachment of the migrating Cimbri, left there in charge of surplus cattle and baggage while the main body went on to Italy.142

A migration rarely involves a single people even at the start. It becomes contagious either by example or by the subjection of several neighboring tribes to the same impelling force, by reason of which all start at or near the same time. We find the Cimbri and Teutons combined with Celts from the island of Batavia143 in the first Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire. Jutes, Saxons and Angles started in close succession for Britain, and the Saxon group included Frisians.144 An unavoidable concomitant of great migrations, especially those of nomads, is their tendency to sweep into the vortex of their movement any people whom they brush on the way. Both individuals and tribes are thus caught up by the current. The general convergence of the central German tribes towards the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire during the Marcomannic War drew in its train the Lombards from the lower Elbe down to the middle Danube and Theiss.145 The force of the Lombards invading Italy in 568 included twenty thousand Saxons from Swabia, Gepidae from the middle Danube, Bulgarians, Slavs from the Russian Ukraine, together with various tribes from the Alpine district of Noricum and the fluvial plains of Pannonia. Two centuries later the names of these non-Lombard tribes still survived in certain villages of Italy which had formed their centers.146 The army which Attila the Hun brought into Gaul was a motley crowd, comprising peoples of probable Slav origin from the Russian steppes, Teutonic Ostrogoths and Gepidae, and numerous German tribes, besides the Huns themselves. When this horde withdrew after the death of Attila, Gepidae and Ostrogoths settled along the middle Danube, and the Slavonic contingent along the Alpine courses of the Drave and Save Rivers.147 The Vandal migration which in 409 invaded Spain included the Turanian Alans and the German Suevi. The Alans found a temporary home in Portugal, which they later abandoned to join the Vandal invasion of North Africa, while the Suevi settled permanently in the northwestern mountains of Spain. The Vandals occupied in Spain two widely separated districts, one in the mountain region of Galicia next to the Suevi, and the other in the fertile valley of Andalusia in the south, while the northeastern part of the peninsula was occupied by intruding Visigoths.148 Add to these the original Iberian and Celtic stocks of the peninsula and the Roman strain previously introduced, and the various elements which have entered into the Spanish people become apparent.149

The absorption of foreign elements is not confined to large groups whose names come down in history, nor is the ensuing modification one of blood alone. Every land migration or expansion of a people passes by or through the territories of other peoples; by these it is inevitably influenced in point of civilization, and from them individuals are absorbed into the wandering throng by marriage or adoption, or a score of ways. This assimilation of blood and local culture is facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of historical movements are slow, a leisurely drift. Even the great Völkerwanderung, which history has shown us generally in the moment of swift, final descent upon the imperial city, in reality consisted of a succession of advances with long halts between. The Vandals, whose original seats were probably in central or eastern Prussia, drifted southward with the general movement of the German barbarians toward the borders of the Empire late in the second century, and, after the Marcomannic War (175 A.D.), settled in Dacia north of the lower Danube under the Roman sway. In 271 they were located on the middle Danube, and sixty years afterwards in Moravia. Later they settled for seventy years in Pannonia within the Empire, where they assimilated Roman civilization and adopted the Arian form of Christianity from their Gothic neighbors.150 In Spain, as we have seen, they occupied Galicia and Andalusia for a time before passing over into Africa in 429. Here was a migration lasting two centuries and a half, reaching from the Baltic to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, starting on the bleak sterile plains of the north amid barbarous neighbors, ending in the sunny grain fields and rich cities of Roman Africa. The picture which we get of the victorious Vandals parceling out the estates of Roman nobles, and, from the standpoint of their more liberal faith, profiting by the dissensions of the two Catholic sects of Africa, shows us a people greatly modified by their long sweep through the civilized outskirts of the Empire. So it was with the Lombards and Goths who invaded Italy.

Among primitive tribes, who move in smaller groups and must conform closely to the dictates of their environment, the modifying effects of people and land through which they pass are conspicuous. Ratzel describes the gradual withdrawal of a Hottentot people from western Cape Colony far into the arid interior before the advance of Kaffirs and Europeans by saying: "The stock and name of the Namaquas wandered northward, acquiring new elements, and in course of time filling the old mold with new contents."151 This is the typical result of such primitive movements. The migration of the Delaware Indians from an early home somewhere northwest of the Great Lakes to their historical habitat between the Hudson and Potomac Rivers was a slow progress, which somewhere brought them into contact with maize-growing tribes, and gave them their start in agriculture.152 The transit lands through which these great race journeys pass exercise a modifying effect chiefly through their culture and their peoples, less through their physical features and climate. For that the stay of the visitants is generally too brief.

Even early maritime migrants did not keep their strains pure. The untried navigator sailing from island to headland, hugging the coast and putting ashore for water, came into contact with the natives. Cross currents of migration can be traced in Polynesian waters, where certain islands are nodal points which have given and received of races and culture through centuries of movement. The original white population of Uruguay differed widely from that of the other Spanish republics of South America. Its nucleus was a large immigration of Canary Islanders. These were descendants of Spaniards and the native Guanches of the Canaries, mingled also with Norman, Flemish and Moorish blood.153 The Norse on their way to Iceland may have picked up a Celtic element in the islands north of Scotland; but from the Faroe group onward they found only empty Iceland and Greenland. This was an exceptional experience. Early navigation, owing to its limitations, purposely restricted itself to the known. Men voyaged where men had voyaged before and were to be found. Journeys into the untenanted parts of the world were rare. However, the probable eastward expansion of the Eskimo along the Arctic rim of North America belongs in this class, so that this northern folk has suffered no modification from contact with others, except where Alaska approaches Asia.

The land traversed by a migrating horde is not to be pictured as a dead road beneath their feet, but rather as a wide region of transit and transition, potent to influence them by its geography and people, and to modify them in the course of their passage. The route which they follow is a succession of habitats, in which they linger and domicile themselves for a while, though not long enough to lose wholly the habits of life and thought acquired in their previous dwelling place. Although nature in many places, by means of valleys, low plains, mountain passes or oasis lines, points out the way of these race movements, it is safer to think and speak of this way as a transit land, not as a path or road. Even where the district of migration has been the sea, as among the Caribs of the Antilles Islands, the Moros of the Philippines, and the Polynesians of the Pacific, man sends his roots like a water plant down into the restless element beneath, and reflects its influence in all his thought and activities.

Every aggressive historical movement, whether bold migration or forcible extension of the home territory, involves displacement or passive movement of other peoples (except in those rare occupations of vacant lands), who in turn are forced to encroach upon the lands of others. These conditions involve war, which is an important form of the historical movement, contributing to new social contacts and fusion of racial stocks. Raids and piratical descents are often the preliminary of great historical movements. They first expand the geographical horizon, and end in permanent settlements, which involve finally considerable transfers of population, summoned to strengthen the position of the interloper. Such was the history of the Germanic invasions of Britain, the Scandinavian settlements on the shores of Iceland, Britain, and France, and the incursions of Saharan tribes into the Sudanese states. Among pastoral nomads war is the rule; the tribe, a mobilized nation, is always on a war footing with its neighbors. The scant supply of wells and pasturage, inadequate in the dry season, involves rivalry and conflict for their possession as agricultural lands do not. Failure of water or grass is followed by the decline of the herds, and then by marauding expeditions into the river valleys to supply the temporary want of food. When population increases beyond the limits of subsistence in the needy steppes, such raids become the rule and end in the conquest of the more favored lands, with resulting amalgamation of race and culture.154

The wars of savage and pastoral peoples affect the whole tribe. All the able-bodied men are combatants, and all the women and children constitute the spoils of war in case of defeat. This fact is important, since the purpose of primitive conflicts is to enslave and pillage, rather than to acquire land. The result is that a whole district may be laid waste, but when the devastators withdraw, it is gradually repopulated by bordering tribes, who make new ethnic combinations. After the destruction of the Eries by the Iroquois in 1655, Ohio was left practically uninhabited for a hundred and fifty years. Then the Iroquoian Wyandots extended their settlements into northwestern Ohio from their base in southern Michigan, while the Miami Confederacy along the southern shore of Lake Michigan pushed their borders into the western part. The Muskingum Valley in the eastern portion was occupied about 1750 by Delawares from eastern Pennsylvania, the Scioto by Shawnees, and the northeast corner of the territory by detachments of Iroquois, chiefly Senecas.155 The long wars between the Algonquin Indians of the north and the Appalachian tribes of the south kept the district of Kentucky a No Man's Land, in convenient vacancy for occupation by the white settlers, when they began the westward movement.156 [Map page 156.]

This desolation is produced partly by killing, but chiefly by enslavement of prisoners and the flight of the conquered. Both constitute compulsory migrations of far-reaching effect in the fusion of races and the blending of civilizations. The thousands of Greek slaves who were brought to ancient Rome contributed to its refinement and polish. All the nations of the known world, from Briton to Syrian and Jew, were represented in the slave markets of the imperial capital, and contributed their elements to the final composition of the Roman people. When we read of ninety-seven thousand Hebrews whom Titus sold into bondage after the fall of Jerusalem, of forty thousand Greeks sold by Lucullus after one victory, and the auction sub corona of whole tribes in Gaul by Cæsar, the scale of this forcible transfer becomes apparent, and its power as an agent of race amalgamation. Senator Sam Houston of Texas, speaking of the Comanche Indians, in the United States Senate, December 31, 1854, said: "There are not less than two thousand prisoners (whites) in the hands of the Comanches, four hundred in one band in my own state.... They take no prisoners but women and boys."157 It was customary among the Indians to use captured women as concubines and to adopt into the tribe such boys as survived the cruel treatment to which they were subjected. Since the Comanches in 1847 were variously estimated to number from nine to twelve thousand,158 so large a proportion of captives would modify the native stock.

In Africa slavery has been intimately associated with agriculture as a source of wealth, and therefore has lent motive to intertribal wars. Captives were enslaved and then gradually absorbed into the tribe of their masters. Thus war and slavery contributed greatly to that widespread blending of races which characterizes negro Africa. Slaves became a medium of exchange and an article of commerce with other continents. The negro slave trade had its chief importance in the eyes of ethnologists and historians because, in distributing the black races in white continents, it has given a "negro question" to the United States, superseded the native Indian stock of the Antilles by negroes, and left a broad negro strain in the blood of Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. This particular historical movement, which during the two centuries of its greatest activity involved larger numbers than the Tartar invasion of Russia or the Turkish invasion of Europe, for a long period gave to black Africa the only historical importance which it possessed for the rest of the world.159

In higher stages of political development, war aiming at the subjugation of large territories finds another means to fuse the subject peoples and assimilate them to a common standard of civilization. The purpose is unification and the obliteration of local differences. These are also the unconscious ends of evolution by historical movement. With this object, conquerors the world over have used a system of tribal and racial exchanges. It was the policy of the Incas of ancient Peru to remove conquered tribes to distant parts of the realm, and supply their places with colonists from other districts who had long been subjected and were more or less assimilated.160 In 722 B.C. the Assyrian king, Sargon, overran Samaria, carried away the Ten Tribes of Israel beyond the Tigris and scattered them among the cities of Media, where they probably merged with the local population. To the country left vacant by their wholesale deportation he transplanted people from Babylon and other Mesopotamian cities.161 The descendants of these, mingled with the poorer class of Jews still left there, formed the despised Samaritans of the time of Christ. The Kingdom of Judah later was despoiled by Nebuchadnezzar of much of its population, which was carried off to Babylon.

This plan of partial deportation and colonization characterized the Roman method of Romanization. Removal of the conquered from their native environment facilitated the process, while it weakened the spirit and power of revolt. The Romans met bitter opposition from the mountain tribes when trying to open up the northern passes of the Apennines. Consequently they removed the Ligurian tribe of the Apuanians, forty-seven thousand in number, far south to Samnium. When in 15 B.C. the region of the Rhaetian Alps was joined to the Empire, forty thousand of the inhabitants were transplanted from the mountains to the plain. The same method was used with the Scordisci and Dacians of the Danube. More often the mortality of war so thinned the population, that the settlement of Roman military colonies among them sufficed to keep down revolt and to Romanize the surviving fragment. The large area of Romance speech found in Roumania and eastern Hungary, despite the controversy about its origin,162 seems to have had its chief source in the extensive Roman colonies planted by the Emperor Trajan in conquered Dacia.163 In Iberian Spain, which bitterly resisted Romanization, the process was facilitated by the presence of large garrisons of soldiers. Between 196 and 169 B.C. the troops amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand, and many of them remained in the country as colonists.164 Compare the settlement of Scotch troops in French Canada by land grants after 1763, resulting in the survival to-day of sandy hair, blue eyes, and highland names among the French-speaking habitants of Murray Bay and other districts. The Turks in the fifteenth century brought large bodies of Moslem converts from Asia Minor to garrison Macedonia and Thessaly, thereby robbing the Anatolian Plateau of half its original population. Into the vacuum thus formed a current of nomads from inner Asia has poured ever since.165

Every active historical movement which enters an already populated country gives rise there to passive movements, either compression of the native folk followed by amalgamation, or displacement and withdrawal. The latter in some degree attends every territorial encroachment. Only where there is an abundance of free land can a people retire as a whole before the onslaught, and maintain their national or racial solidarity. Thus the Slavs seem largely to have withdrawn before the Germans in the Baltic plains of Europe. The Indians of North and South America retired westward before the advance of the whites from the Atlantic coast. The Cherokee nation, who once had a broad belt of country extending from the Tennessee Valley through South Carolina to the ocean,166 first retracted their frontier to the Appalachian Mountains; in 1816 they were confined to an ever shrinking territory on the middle Tennessee and the southern end of the highlands; in 1818 they began to retire beyond the Mississippi, and in 1828 beyond the western boundary of Arkansas.167 The story of the Shawnees and Delawares is a replica of this.168 In the same way Hottentots and Kaffirs in South Africa are withdrawing northward and westward into the desert before the protruding frontier of white settlement, as the Boers before the English treked farther into the veldt. [See map page 105.]

Where the people attacked or displaced is small or a broken remnant, it often takes refuge among a neighboring or kindred tribe. The small Siouan tribes of the Carolinas, reduced to fragments by repeated Iroquois raids, combined with their Siouan kinsmen the Catawbas, who consequently in 1743 included twenty dialects among their little band.169 The Iroquoian Tuscaroras of North Carolina, defeated and weakened by the whites in 1711, fled north to the Iroquois of New York, where they formed the Sixth Nation of the Confederation. The Yamese Indians, who shifted back and forth between the borders of Florida and South Carolina, defeated first by the whites and then by the Creeks, found a refuge for the remnant of their tribe among the Seminoles, in whom they merged and disappeared as a distinct tribe170 —the fate of most of these fragmentary peoples. [See map page 54.]

When the fugitive body is large, it is forced to split up in order to escape. Hence every fugitive movement tends to assume the character of a dispersal, all the more as organization and leadership vanish in the catastrophe. The fissile character of primitive societies especially contributes to this end, so that almost every story of Indian and native African warfare tells of shattered remnants fleeing in several directions. Among civilized peoples, the dispersal is that of individuals and has far-reaching historical effects. After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews were scattered over the earth, the debris of a nation. The religious wars of France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused Huguenots to flee to Switzerland, Germany, Holland, England, and South Carolina; they even tried to establish a colony on the coast of Brazil. Everywhere they contributed a valuable element to the economic and social life of the community which they joined. The great schism in the Russian Church became an agent of emigration and colonization. It helped to spread the Russian nationality over remote frontier regions of the empire which previously had been almost exclusively Asiatic; and distributed groups of dissenters in the neighboring provinces of Turkey, Roumania, Austria, Poland and Prussia.171

The hope of safety from pursuit drives fugitive peoples into isolated and barren places that are scarcely accessible or habitable, and thereby extends the inhabited area of the earth long before mere pressure of population would have stretched it to such limits. We find these refugee folk living in pile villages built over the water, in deserts, in swamps, mangrove thickets, very high mountains, marshy deltas, and remote or barren islands, all which can be classified as regions of retreat. Fugitives try to place between themselves and their pursuers a barrier of sea or desert or mountains, and in doing this have themselves surmounted some of the greatest obstacles to the spread of the human race.

Districts of refuge located centrally to several natural regions of migration receive immigrants from many sides, and are therefore often characterized by a bizarre grouping of populations. The cluster of marshy islands at the head of the Adriatic received fugitives from a long semi-circle of north Italian cities during the barbarian invasions. Each refugee colony occupied a separate island, and finally all coalesced to form the city of Venice. Central mountain districts like the Alps and Caucasus contain "the sweepings of the plains." The Caucasus particularly, on the border between Europe and Asia, contains every physical type and representative of every linguistic family of Eurasia, except pure Aryan. Nowhere else in the world probably is there such a heterogeneous lot of peoples, languages and religions. Ripley calls the Caucasus "a grave of peoples, of languages, of customs and physical types."172 Its base, north and south, and the longitudinal groove through its center from east to west have been swept by various racial currents, which have cast up their flotsam into its valleys. The pueblos of our arid Southwest, essentially an area of asylum, are inhabited by Indians of four distinct stocks, and only one of them, the Moquis, show clearly kinship to another tribe outside this territory,173 so that they are survivals. The twenty-eight different Indian stocks huddled together in small and diverse linguistic groups between the Pacific Ocean and the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range174 leave the impression that these protected valleys, similar to the Caucasus in their ethnic diversity, were an asylum for remnants of depleted stocks who had fled to the western highlands before the great Indian migrations of the interior.175 Making their way painfully and at great cost of life through a region of mountain and desert, they came out in diminished bands to survive in the protection of the great barrier. Of the twenty-one Indian linguistic stocks which have become extinct since the arrival of the white man, fifteen belong to this transmontane strip of the Pacific slope176 —evidence of the fragmentary character of these stocks and their consequently small power of resistance, [See map page 54.]

Advance to a completely sedentary life, as we see it among modern civilized nations, prohibits the migration of whole peoples, or even of large groups when maintaining their political organization. On the other hand, however, sedentary life and advanced civilization bring rapid increase of population, improved methods of communication, and an enlarged geographical horizon. These conditions encourage and facilitate emigration and colonization, forms of historical movement which have characterized the great commercial peoples of antiquity and the overcrowded nations of modern times. These forms do not involve a whole people, but only individuals and small groups, though in time the total result may represent a considerable proportion of the original population. The United States in 1890 contained 980,938 immigrants from Canada and Newfoundland,177 or just one-fifth the total population of the Dominion in that same year. Germany since 1820 has contributed at least five million citizens to non-European lands. Ireland since 1841 has seen nearly four millions of its inhabitants drawn off to other countries,178 an amount only little less than its present population. It is estimated that since 1851 emigration has carried off from County Clare and Kerry seventy-two per cent. of the average population; and yet those counties are still crowded.179 Among those who abandon their homes in search of easier conditions of living, certain ages and certain social and industrial classes predominate. A typical emigrant group to America represents largely the lower walks of life, includes an abnormal proportion of men and adults, and about three-fourths of it are unskilled laborers and agriculturists.180

Colonization, the most potent instrument of organized expansion, has in recent centuries changed the relative significance of the great colonial nations of Europe. It raised England from a small insular country to the center of a world power. It gave sudden though temporary preëminence to Spain and Portugal, a new lease of life to little Holland, and ominous importance to Russia. Germany, who entered the colonial field only in 1880, found little desirable land left; and yet it was especially Germany who needed an outlet for her redundant population. With all these states, as with ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Yemen, the initial purpose was commerce or in some form the exploitation of the new territory. Colonies were originally trading stations established as safe termini for trade routes.181 Colonial government, as administered by the mother country, originally had an eye single for the profits of trade: witness the experience of the Thirteen Colonies with Great Britain. Colonial wars have largely meant the rivalry of competing nations seeking the same markets, as the history of the Portuguese and Dutch in the East Indies, and the English and French in America prove. The first Punic War had a like commercial origin—rivalry for the trade of Magna Græcia between Rome and Carthage, the dominant colonial powers of the western Mediterranean. Such wars result in expansion for the victor.

Commerce, which so largely underlies colonization, is itself a form of historical movement. It both causes and stimulates great movements of peoples, yet it differs from these fundamentally in its relation to the land. Commerce traverses the land to reach its destination, but takes account of natural features only as these affect transportation and travel. It has to do with systems of routes and goals, which it aims to reach as quickly as possible. It reduces its cortege to essentials; eliminates women and children. Therefore it surmounts natural barriers which block the advance of other forms of the historical movement. Merchant caravans are constantly crossing the desert, but not so peoples. Traders with loaded yaks or ponies push across the Karakorum Mountains by passes where a migrating horde would starve and freeze. The northern limit of the Mediterranean race in Spain lies sharply defined along the crest of the Pyrenees, whose long unbroken wall forms one of the most pronounced boundaries in Europe;182 yet traders and smugglers have pushed their way through from time immemorial. Long after Etruscan merchants had crossed northward over the Alps, Roman expansion and colonization made a detour around the mountains westward into Gaul, with the result that the Germans received Roman civilization not straight from the south, but secondhand through their Gallic neighbors west of the Rhine.

Commerce, though differing from other historical movements, may give to these direction and destination. The trader is frequently the herald of soldier and settler. He becomes their guide, takes them along the trail which he has blazed, and gives them his own definiteness of aim. The earliest Roman conquest of the Alpine tribes was made for the purpose of opening the passes for traders and abolishing the heavy transit duties imposed by the mountaineers.183 Fur-traders inaugurated French expansion to the far west of Canada, and the Russian advance into Siberia. The ancient amber route across Russia from the Baltic to the Euxine probably guided the Goths in their migration from their northern seats to the fertile lands in southern Russia, where they first appear in history as the Ostrogoths.184 The caravan trade across the Sahara from the Niger to the Mediterranean coast has itself embodied an historical movement, by bringing out enough negro slaves appreciably to modify the ethnic composition of the population in many parts of North Africa.185 It was this trade which also suggested to Prince Henry of Portugal in 1415, when campaigning in Morocco, the plan of reaching the Guinea Coast by sea and diverting its gold dust and slaves to the port of Lisbon, a movement which resulted in the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa.186

Every staple place and trading station is a center of geographical information; it therefore gives an impulse to expansion by widening the geographical horizon. The Lewis and Clark Expedition found the Mandan villages at the northern bend of the Missouri River the center of a trade which extended west to the Pacific, through the agency of the Crow and Paunch Indians of the upper Yellowstone, and far north to the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Rivers. Here in conversation with British and French fur-traders of the Northwest Company's posts, they secured information about the western country they were to explore.187 Similarly the trade of the early Jesuit missions at La Pointe near the west end of Lake Superior annually drew the Indians from a wide circle sweeping from Green Bay and the Fox River in the south, across the Mississippi around to the Lake of the Woods and far north of Lake Superior.188 Here Marquette first heard of the great river destined to carry French dominion to the Gulf of Mexico.

Trade often finds in religion an associate and coadjutor in directing and stimulating the historical movement. China regards modern Christian missions as effective European agencies for the spread of commercial and political power. Jesuit and fur-trader plunged together into the wilds of colonial Canada; Spanish priest and gold-seeker into Mexico and Peru. American missionary pressed close upon the heels of fur-trader into the Oregon country. Jason Lee, having established a Methodist mission on the Willamette in 1834, himself experienced sudden conversion from religionist to colonizer. He undertook a temporary mission back to the settled States, where he preached a stirring propaganda for the settlement and appropriation of the disputed Oregon country, before the British should fasten their grip upon it. The United States owes Hawaii to the expansionist spirit of American missionaries. Thirty years after their arrival in the islands, they held all the important offices under the native government, and had secured valuable tracts of lands, laying the foundation of the landed aristocracy of planters established there to-day. Their sons and grandsons took the lead in the Revolution of 1893, and in the movement for annexation to the United States. Thus sometimes do the meek inherit the earth.

The famous pilgrimages of the world, in which the commercial element has been more or less conspicuous,189 have contributed greatly to the circulation of peoples and ideas, especially as they involve multitudes and draw from a large circle of lands. Their economic, intellectual and political effects rank them as one phase of the historical movement. Herodotus tells of seven hundred thousand Egyptians flocking to the city of Bubastis from all parts of Egypt for the festival of Diana.190 The worship of Ashtoreth in Bambyce in Syria drew votaries from all the Semitic peoples except the Jews. As early as 386 A.D. Christian pilgrims flocked to Jerusalem from Armenia, Persia, India, Ethiopia, and even from Gaul and Britain. Jerusalem gave rise to those armed pilgrimages, the Crusades, with all their far-reaching results. The pilgrimages to Rome, which in the Jubilee of 1300 brought two hundred thousand worshipers to the sacred city, did much to consolidate papal supremacy over Latin Christendom.191 As the roads to Rome took the pious wayfarers through Milan, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, and other great cities of Italy, they were so many channels for the distribution of Italian art and culture over the more untutored lands of western Europe.

Though Mecca is visited annually by only seventy or eighty thousand pilgrims, it puts into motion a far greater number over the whole Mohammedan world, from westernmost Africa to Chinese Turkestan.192 Yearly a great pilgrimage, numbering in 1905 eighty thousand souls, moves across Africa eastward through the Sudan on its way to the Red Sea and Mecca. Many traders join the caravans of the devout both for protection and profit, and the devout themselves travel with herds of cattle to trade in on the way. The merchants are prone to drop out and settle in any attractive country, and few get beyond the populous markets of Wadai. The British and French governments in the Sudan aid and protect these pilgrimages; they recognize them as a political force, because they spread the story of the security and order of European rule.193 The markets of western Tibet, recently opened to Indian merchants by the British expedition to Lhassa, promote intercourse between the two countries especially because of the sacred lakes and mountains in their vicinity, which are goals of pilgrimage alike to Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist. They offer an opportunity to acquire merit and profit at the same time, an irresistible combination to the needy, pious Hindu. Therefore across the rugged passes of the Himalayas he drives his yaks laden with English merchandise, an unconscious instrument for the spread of English influence, English civilization and the extension of the English market, as the Colonial Office well understands.194

The forms which have been assumed by the historical movement are varied, but all have contributed to the spread of man over the habitable globe. The yellow, white and red races have become adapted to every zone; the black race, whether in Africa, Australia or Melanesia, is confined chiefly to the Tropics. A like conservatism as to habitat tends to characterize all sub-races, peoples, and tribes of the human family. The fact which strikes one in studying the migrations of these smaller groups is their adherence each to a certain zone or heat belt defined by certain isothermal lines (see map chap. XVII.), their reluctance to protrude beyond its limits, and the restricted range and small numerical strength of such protrusions as occur. This seems to be the conservatism of the mature race type, which has lost some of its plasticity and shuns or succumbs to the ordeal of adaptation to contrasted climatic conditions, except when civilization enables it partially to neutralize their effects.

Primitive Indian Stocks Of South America (From Helmolt's History of the World. By permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.)

In South America, Caribs and Arawaks showed a strictly tropical distribution from Hayti to the southern watershed of the Amazon. The Tupis, moving down the Parana-La Plata system, made a short excursion beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, though not beyond the hot belt, then turned equator-ward again along the coast.195 In North America we find some exceptions to the rule. For instance, though the main area of the Athapascan stock is found in the frigid belt of Canada and Alaska, north of the annual isotherm of 0°C. (32°F.) small residual fragments of these people are scattered also along the Pacific coast of Oregon and California, marking the old line of march of a large group which drifted southward into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the northern part of Mexico. The Shoshone stock, which originally occupied the Great Basin and western intermontane plateau up to the borders of Canada, sent out offshoots which developed into the ancient civilized tribes of tropical Mexico and Central America. Both these emigrations to more southern zones were part of the great southward trend characterizing all movements on the Pacific side of the continent, probably from an original ethnic port of entry near Bering Strait; and part also of the general southward drift in search of more genial climate, which landed the van of northern Siouan, Algonquin and Iroquoian stocks in the present area of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, while the base of their territory stretched out to its greatest width in southern Canada and contiguous parts of the United States. [See map page 54.]196

Ethnographical Map Of India From The Indian Census Of 1901.

Ethnographical Map Of Asia. Vertical Shading in the North is Slav.

If we turn to the eastern hemisphere, we find the Malays and Malayo-Polynesians, differentiated offshoots of the Mongolian stock, restricted to the Tropics, except where Polynesians have spread to outlying New Zealand. The Chinese draw their political boundary nearly along the Tropic of Cancer, but they have freely lapped over this frontier into Indo-China as far as Singapore.197 Combined with this expansion was the early infiltration of the Chinese into the Philippines, Borneo, and the western Sunda Isles, all distinctly tropical. The fact that the Chinese show a physical capacity for acclimatization found in no other race explains in part their presence into the Tropics. In contrast, the Aryan folk of India, whether in their pure type as found in the Punjab and Rajputana Desert, or mingled with the earlier Dravidian races belong to the hot belt but scarcely reach the Tropic of Cancer,198 though their language has far overshot this line both in the Deccan and the Ganges Delta. One spore of Aryan stock, in about 450 B.C., moved by sea from the Bay of Cambay to Ceylon; mingling there with the Tamil natives, they became the progenitors of the Singhalese, forming a hybrid tropical offshoot.

Europe, except for its small sub-arctic area, has received immigrants, according to the testimony of history and ethnology, only from the temperate parts of Asia and Africa, with the one exception of the Saracens of Arabia, whose original home lay wholly within the hot climate belt of 20°C. (68°F.). Saracen expansion, in covering Persia, Syria, and Egypt, still kept to this hot belt; only in the Barbary Coast of Africa and in Spain did it protrude into the temperate belt. Though this last territory was extra-tropical, it was essentially semi-arid and sub-tropical in temperature, like the dry trade-wind belt whence the Saracens had sprung.

Ethnographical Map Of Africa And Arabia.

The Semitic folk of Arabia and the desert Hamites of northern Africa, bred by their hot, dry environment to a nomadic life, have been drawn southward over the Sahara across the Tropic into the grasslands of the Sudan, permeating a wide zone of negro folk with the political control, religion, civilization and blood of the Mediterranean north. Here similar though better conditions of life, a climate hotter though less arid, attracted Hamitic invasion, while the relatively dense native population in a lower stage of economic development presented to the commercial Semites the attraction of lucrative trade. South of the equator the native Bantu Kaffirs, essentially a tropical people, spread beyond their zonal border to the south coast of Africa at 33° S.L., and displaced the yellow Hottentots199 before the arrival of the Dutch in 1602; while in the early nineteenth century we hear of the Makololo, a division of this same Kaffir stock, leaving their native seats near the southern sources of the Vaal River at 28° S.L. and moving some nine hundred miles northward to the Barotse territory on the upper Zambesi at 15° S.L.200 This again was a movement of a pastoral people across a tropic to other grasslands, to climatic conditions scarcely different from those which they had left.

The modern colonial movements which have been genuine race expansions have shown a tendency not only to adhere to their zone, but to follow parallels of latitude or isotherms. The stratification of European peoples in the Americas, excepting Spanish and Portuguese, coincides with heat zones. Internal colonization in the United States reveals the same principle.201 Russian settlements in Asia stretch across Siberia chiefly between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth parallels; these same lines include the ancient Slav territory in Germany between the Vistula and Weser. The great efflux of home-seekers, as opposed to the smaller contingent of mere conquerors and exploiters, which has poured forth from Europe since the fifteenth century, has found its destinations largely in the temperate parts of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Even the Spanish overlords in Mexico and Peru domiciled themselves chiefly in the highlands, where altitude in part counteracts tropical latitude. European immigration into South America to-day greatly predominates in the temperate portions,—in Argentine, Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil and southern Chile. While Argentine's population includes over one million white foreigners, who comprise twenty per cent. of the total,202 Venezuela has no genuine white immigration. Its population, which comprises only one per cent. of pure whites, consists chiefly of negroes, mulattoes, and Sambos, hybrids of negro and Indian race. In British Guiana, negroes and East Indian coolies, both importations from other tropical lands, comprise eighty-one per cent. of the population.203

The movement of Europeans into the tropical regions of Asia, Australasia, Africa and America, like the American advance into the Philippines, represents commercial and political, not genuine ethnic expansion. Except where it resorts to hybridization, it seeks not new homesteads, but the profits of tropical trade and the markets for European manufactures found in retarded populations. These it secures either by a small but permanently domiciled ruling class, as formerly in Spanish and Portuguese America, or by a body of European officials, clerks, agents and soldiers, sent out for a term of years. Such are the seventy-six thousand Britishers who manage the affairs of commerce and state in British India, and the smaller number of Dutch who perform the same functions in the Dutch East India islands. The basis of this system is exploitation. It represents neither a high economic, ethical, nor social ideal, and therefore lacks the stamp of geographic finality.

A migrating or expanding people, when free to choose, is prone to seek a new home with like geographic conditions to the old. Hence the stamp once given by an environment tends to perpetuate itself. All people, especially those in the lower stages of culture, are conservative in their fundamental activities. Agriculture is intolerable to pastoral nomads, hunting has little attraction for a genuine fisher folk. Therefore such peoples in expansion seek an environment in which the national aptitudes, slowly evolved in their native seats, find a ready field. Thus arise natural provinces of distribution, whose location, climate, physical features, and size reflect the social and economic adaptation of the inhabitants to a certain type of environment. A shepherd folk, when breaking off from its parent stock like Abraham's family from their Mesopotamian kinsmen, seeks a land rich in open pastures and large enough to support its wasteful nomadic economy. A seafaring people absorb an ever longer strip of seaboard, like the Eskimo of Arctic America, or throw out their settlements from inlet to inlet or island to island, as did Malays and Polynesians in the Pacific, ancient Greeks and Phoenicians in the subtropical Mediterranean, and the Norse in the northern seas. The Dutch, bred to the national profession of diking and draining, appear in their element in the water-logged coast of Sumatra and Guiana,204 where they cultivate lands reclaimed from the sea; or as colonists in the Vistula lowlands, whither Prussia imported them to do their ancestral task, just as the English employed their Dutch prisoners after the wars with Holland in the seventeenth century to dike and drain the fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Moreover, the commercial talent of the Dutch, trained by their advantageous situation on the North Sea about the Rhine mouths, guided their early traders to similar locations elsewhere, like the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, or planted them on islands either furnishing or commanding extensive trade, such as Ceylon, Mauritius, the East Indies, or the Dutch holdings in the Antilles.

Much farther down in the cultural scale we find the fisher tribes of Central Africa extending their villages from point to point along the equatorial streams, and the river Indians of South America gradually spreading from headwaters to estuary, and thence to the related environment of the coast. The Tupis, essentially a water race, have left traces of their occupation only where river or coast enabled them to live by their inherited aptitudes.205 The distribution of the ancient mounds in North America shows their builders to have sought with few exceptions protected sites near alluvial lowlands, commanding rich soil for cultivation and the fish supply from the nearby river. Mountaineer folk often move from one upland district to another, as did the Lombards of Alpine Pannonia in their conquest of Lombardy and Apennine Italy, where all their four duchies were restricted to the highlands of the peninsula.206 The conquests of the ancient Incas and the spread of their race covered one Andean valley after another for a stretch of one thousand five hundred miles, wherever climatic and physical conditions were favorable to their irrigated tillage and highland herds of llamas. They found it easier to climb pass after pass and mount to ever higher altitudes, rather than descend to the suffocating coasts where neither man nor beast could long survive, though they pushed the political boundary finally to the seaboard. [Map page 101.]

The search for better land, milder climate, and easier conditions of living starts many a movement of peoples which, in view of their purpose, necessarily leads them into an environment sharply contrasted to their original habitat. Such has been the radial outflow of the Mongoloid tribes down from the rugged highlands of central Asia to the fertile river lowlands of the peripheral lands; the descent of the Iran pastors upon the agricultural folk of the Indus, Ganges and Mesopotamian valleys, and the swoop of desert-born conquerors upon the unresisting tillers of well-watered fields in all times, from the ancient Hyksos of the Nile to the modern Fulbe of the Niger Valley.

The attraction of a milder climate has caused in the northern hemisphere a constantly recurring migration from north to south. In primitive North America, along the whole broad Atlantic slope, the predominant direction of Indian migrations was from north to south, accompanied by a drift from west to east.207 On the Pacific side of the continent also the trend was southward. This is generally conceded regardless of theory as to whether the Indians first found entrance to the continent at its northeast or northwest corner. It was a movement toward milder climates.208 Study of the Völkerwanderungen in Europe reveals two currents or drifts in varied combination, one from north to south and the other from east to west, but both of them aimed at regions of better climate; for the milder temperature and more abundant rainfall of western Europe made a country as alluring to the Goths, Huns, Alans, Slavs, Bulgars and Tartars of Asiatic deserts and Russian steppes, as were the sunny Mediterranean peninsulas to the dwellers of the bleak Baltic coasts. This is one geographic fact back of the conspicuous westward movement formulated into an historical principle: "Westward the star of empire takes its course." The establishment of European colonies on the western side of the Atlantic, their extension thence to the Pacific and ever westward, till European culture was transplanted to the Philippines by Spain and more recently by the United States, constitute the most remarkable sustained movement made by any one race.

But westward movements are not the only ones. On the Pacific slope of Asia the star has moved eastward. From highland Mongolia issued the throng which originally populated the lowlands of China; and ever since, one nomad conqueror after the other has descended thence to rule the fruitful plains of Chili and the teeming populations of the Yangtze Valley.209 Russia, blocked in its hoped for expansion to the west by the strong powers of central Europe, stretched its dominion eastward to the Pacific and for a short time over to Alaska. The chief expansion of the German people and the German Empire in historical times has also been from west to east; but this eastward advance is probably only retracing the steps taken by many primitive Teutonic tribes as they drifted Rhineward from an earlier habitat along the Vistula.

Since the world is small, it frequently happens that a people after an interval of generations, armed with a higher civilization, will reënter a region which it once left when too crude and untutored to develop the possibilities of the land, but which its better equipment later enables it to exploit. Thus we find a backward expansion of the Chinese westward to the foot of the Pamir, and an internal colonization of the empire to the Ili feeder of Lake Balkash. The expansion of the Japanese into Korea and Saghalin is undoubtedly such a return current, after an interval long enough to work a complete transformation in the primitive Mongolians who found their way to that island home. Sometimes the return represents the ebbing of the tide, rather than the back water of a stream in flood. Such was the retreat of the Moors from Spain to the Berber districts of North Africa, whither they carried echoes of the brilliant Saracen civilization in the Iberian Peninsula. Such has been the gradual withdrawal of the Turks from Europe back to their native Asia, and slow expulsion of the Tartar tribes from Russia to the barren Asiatic limits of their former territory. [See map page 225.]

Voluntary historical movements, seeking congenial or choice regions of the earth, have left its less favored spots undisturbed. Paucity of resources and isolation have generally insured to a region a peaceful history; natural wealth has always brought the conqueror. In ancient Greece the fruitful plains of Thessaly, Boeotia, Elis and Laconia had a fatal attraction for every migrating horde; Attica's rugged surface, poor soil, and side-tracked location off the main line of travel between Hellas and the Peloponnesus saved it from many a rough visitant,210 and hence left the Athenians, according to Thucydides, an indigenous race. The fertility of the Rhine Valley has always attracted invasion, the barren Black Forest range has repelled and obstructed it.

The security of such unproductive highlands lies more in their failure to attract than in their power to resist conquest. When to abundant natural resources, a single spot adds a reputation for wealth, magnificence, an exceptional position for the control of territory or commerce, it becomes a geographical magnet. Such was Delphi for the Gauls of the Balkan Peninsula in the third century, Rome for the Germanic and Hunnish tribes of the Völkerwanderung, Constantinople for the Normans, Turks and Russians, Venice for land-locked Austria, the Mississippi highway and the outlet at New Orleans for our Trans-Allegheny pioneers.

Sometimes the goal is fabulous or mythical, but potent to lure, like the land of El Dorado, abounding in gold and jewels, which for two centuries spurred on Spanish exploration in America. Other than purely material motives may initiate or maintain such a movement, an ideal or a dream of good, like the fountain of eternal youth which brought Ponce de Leon to Florida, the search for the Islands of the Blessed, or the spirit of religious propaganda which stimulated the spread of the Spanish in Mexico and the French in Canada, or the hope of religious toleration which has drawn Quaker, Puritan, Huguenot, and Jew to America. It was an idea of purely spiritual import which directed the century-long movement of the Crusades toward Jerusalem, half Latinized the Levant, and widened the intellectual horizon of Europe. A national or racial sentiment which enhaloes a certain spot may be pregnant with historical results, because at any moment it may start some band of enthusiasts on a path of migration or conquest. The Zionist agitation for the return of oppressed Jews to Palestine, and the establishment of the Liberian Republic for the negroes in Africa rest upon such a sentiment. The reverence of the Christian world for Rome as a goal of pilgrimages materially enhanced the influence of Italy as a school of culture during the Middle Ages. The spiritual and ethnic association of the Mohammedan world with Mecca is always fraught with possible political results. The dominant tribes of the Sudan, followers of Islam, who proudly trace back a fictitious line of ancestry to the Arabs of Yemen, are readily incited to support a new prophet sprung from the race of Mecca.211 The pilgrimages which the Buddhists of the Asiatic highlands make to the sacred city of Lhassa ensure China's control over the restless nomads through the instrumentality of the Grand Lama of Tibet.

Historical movements are varied as to motive, direction, numerical strength, and character, but their final results are two, differentiation and assimilation. Both are important phases of the process of evolution, but the latter gains force with the progress of history and the increase of the world's population.

A people or race which, in its process of numerical growth, spreads over a large territory subjects itself to a widening range of geographic conditions, and therefore of differentiation. The broad expansion of the Teutonic race in Europe, America, Australia and South Africa has brought it into every variety of habitat. If the territory has a monotonous relief like Russia, nevertheless, its mere extent involves diversity of climate and location. The diversity of climate incident to large area involves in turn different animal and plant life, different crops, different economic activities. Even in lowlands the relief, geologic structure, and soil are prone to vary over wide districts. The monotonous surface of Holland shows such contrasts. So do the North German lowlands; here the sandy barren flats of the "geest" alternate with stretches of fertile silt deposited by the rivers or the sea,212 and support different types of communities, which have been admirably described by Gustav Frenssen in his great novel of Jön Uhl. The flat surface of southern Illinois shows in small compass the teeming fertility of the famous "American bottom," the poor clay soil of "Egypt" with its backward population, and the rich prairie land just to the north with its prosperous and progressive farmer class.

When the relief includes mountains, the character not only of the land but of the climate changes, and therewith the type of community. Hence neighboring districts may produce strongly contrasted types of society. Madison County of Kentucky, lying on the eastern margin of the Bluegrass region, contains the rich landed estates, negro laboring class and aristocratic society characteristic of the "planter" communities of the old South; and only twenty miles southeast of Richmond, the center of this wealth and refinement, it includes also the rough barren hill country of the Cumberland Plateau, where are found one-room cabins, moonshine stills, feuds, and a backward population sprung from the same pure English stock as the Bluegrass people.

Here is differentiation due to the immediate influences of environment. The phenomenon reappears in every part of the world, in every race and every age. The contrast between the ancient Greeks of the mountains, coasts and alluvial valleys shows the power of environment to direct economic activities and to modify culture and social organization. So does the differences between the coast, steppe, and forest Indians of Guiana,213 the Kirghis of the Pamir pastures and the Irtysh River valley, the agricultural Berbers of the Atlas Mountains and the Berber nomads of the Sahara, the Swiss of the high, lonely Engadine and those of the crowded Aar valley.

Contrasted environments effect a natural selection in another way and thereby greatly stimulate differentiation, whenever an intruding people contest the ownership of the territory with the inhabitants. The struggle for land means a struggle also for the best land, which therefore falls to the share of the strongest peoples. Weaklings must content themselves with poor soils, inaccessible regions of mountain, swamp or desert. There they deteriorate, or at best strike a slower pace of increase or progress. The difference between the people of the highlands and plains of Great Britain or of France is therefore in part a distinction of race due to this geographical selection,214 in part a distinction of economic development and culture due to geographic influences. Therefore the piedmont belts of the world, except in arid lands, are cultural, ethnic and often political lines of cleavage, showing marked differentiation on either side. Isotherms are other such cleavage lines, marking the limits beyond which an aggressive people did not desire to expand because of an uncongenial climate. The distinction between Anglo-Saxon and Latin America is one of zone as well as race. Everywhere in North America the English stock has dominated or displaced French and Spanish competitors down to the Mexican frontier.

As the great process of European colonization has permeated the earth and multiplied its population, not only the best land but the amount of this has commenced to differentiate the history of various European nations, and that in a way whose end cannot yet be definitely predicted. The best lands have fallen to the first-comers strong enough to hold them. People who early develop powers of expansion, like the English, or who, like the French and Russians, formulate and execute vast territorial policies, secure for their future growth a wide base which will for all time distinguish them from late-comers into the colonial field, like Germany and Italy. These countries see the fecundity of their people redounding to the benefit of alien colonial lands, which have been acquired by enterprising rivals in the choice sections of the temperate zone. German and Italian colonies in torrid, unhealthy, or barren tropical lands, fail to attract emigrants from the mother country, and therefore to enhance national growth.

When colonizers or conquerors appropriate the land of a lower race, we find a territory occupied at least for a time by two types of population, constituting an ethnic, social and often economic differentiation. The separation may be made geographical also. The Indians in the United States have been confined to reservations, like the Hottentots to the twenty or more "locations" in Cape Colony. This is the simplest arrangement. Whether the second or lower type survives depends upon their economic and social utility, into which again geographic conditions enter. The Indians of Canada are a distinct economic factor in that country as trappers for the Hudson Bay Company, and they will so remain till the hunting grounds of the far north are exhausted. The native agriculturists in the Tropics are indispensable to the unacclimated whites. The negroes of the South, introduced for an economic purpose, find their natural habitat in the Black Belt. Here we have an ethnic division of labor for geographical reasons. Castes or social classes, often distinguished by shades of color as in Brahman India, survive as differentiations indicating old lines of race cleavage. There is abundant evidence that the upper classes in Germany, France, Austria, and the British Isles are distinctly lighter of hair and eyes than the peasantry.215 The high-class Japanese are taller and fairer than the masses. Nearly all the African tribes of the Sudan and bordering Sahara include two distinct classes, one of lighter and one of darker shade. Many Fulbe tribes distinguish these classes by the names of "Blacks" and "Whites."216 The two-type people are the result of historical movements.

Differentiation results not only from contrasted geographic conditions, but also from segregation. A moving or expanding throng in search of more and better lands drops off one group to occupy a fertile valley or plain, while the main body goes on its way, till it reaches a satisfactory destination or destinations. The tendency to split and divide, characteristic of primitive peoples, is thus stimulated by migration and expansion. Each offshoot, detached from the main body, tends to diverge from the stock type. If it reaches a naturally isolated region, where its contact without is practically cut off, it grows from its own loins, emphasizes its group characteristic by close in-breeding, and tends to show a development related to biological divergence under conditions of isolation. Since man is essentially a gregarious animal, the size of every such migrating band will always prevent the evolution of any sharply defined variety, according to the standard of biology. Nevertheless, the divergent types of men and societies developed in segregated regions are an echo of the formation of new species under conditions of isolation which is now generally acknowledged by biological science. Isolation was recognized by Darwin as an occasional factor in the origin of species and especially of divergence; in combination with migration it was made the basis of a theory of evolution by Moritz Wagner in 1873;217 and in recent years has come to be regarded as an essential in the explanation of divergence of types, as opposed to differentiation.218

The traditions of the Delaware Indians and Sioux in the north of the United States territory, and of the Creeks in the south, commence with each stock group as a united body, which, as it migrates, splits into tribes and sends out offshoots developing different dialects. Here was tribal differentiation after entry into the general stock area, the process going on during migration as well as after the tribes had become established in their respective habitats. Culture, however, made little progress till after they became sedentary and took up agriculture to supplement the chase.219 Tribes sometimes wander far beyond the limits of their stock, like the Iroquoian Cherokees of East Tennessee and North Carolina or the Athapascan Navajos and Apaches of arid New Mexico and Arizona, who had placed twenty or thirty degrees of latitude between themselves and their brethren in the basins of the Yukon and Mackenzie rivers. Such inevitably come into contrasted climatic conditions, which further modify the immigrants. [See map page 54.]

Wide digressions differentiate them still further from the parent stock by landing them amid different ethnic and social groups, by contact with whom they are inevitably modified. The Namaqua Hottentots, living on the southern margin of the Hottentot country near the frontier of the European settlements in Cape Colony, acquired some elements of civilization, together with a strain of Boer and English blood, and in some cases even the Dutch vernacular. They were therefore differentiated from their nomadic and warlike kinsmen in the grasslands north of the Orange River, which formed the center of the Hottentot area.220 A view of the ancient Germans during the first five or six centuries after Christ reveals differentiation by various contacts in process along all the ragged borders of the Germanic area. The offshoots who pushed westward across the Rhine into Belgian Gaul were rapidly Celticized, abandoning their semi-nomadic life for sedentary agriculture, assimilating the superior civilization which they found there, and steadily merging with the native population. They became Belgae, though still conscious of their Teutonic origin.221 The Batavians, an offshoot of the ancient Chatti living near the Thuringian Forest, appropriated the river island between the Rhine and the Waal. There in the seclusion of their swamps, they became a distinct national unit, retaining their backward German culture and primitive type of German speech, which the Chatti themselves lost by contact with the High Germans.222 Far away on the southeastern margin of the Teutonic area the same process of assimilation to a foreign civilization went on a little later when the Visigoths, after a century of residence on the lower Danube in contact with the Eastern Empire, adopted the Arian form of Christianity which had arisen in the Greek peninsula.223 The border regions of the world show the typical results of the historical movement—differentiation from the core or central group through assimilation to a new group which meets and blends with it along the frontier.

Entrance into a naturally isolated district, from which subsequent incursions are debarred, gives conditions for divergence and the creation of a new type. On the other hand, where few physical barriers are present to form these natural pockets, the process of assimilation goes on over a wide field. Europe is peculiar among the family of continents for its "much divided" geography, commented upon by Strabo. Hence its islands, peninsulas and mountain-rimmed basins have produced a variegated assemblage of peoples, languages and culture. Only where it runs off into the monotonous immensity of Russia do we find a people who in their physical traits, language, and civilization reflect the uniformity of their environment.224

Africa's smooth outline, its plateau surface rimmed with mountains which enclose but fail to divide, and its monotonous configuration have produced a racial and cultural uniformity as striking as Europe's heterogeneity. Constant movements and commixture, migration and conquest, have been the history of the black races, varied by victorious incursions of the Hamitic and Semitic whites from the north, which, however, have resulted in the amalgamation of the two races after conquest.225 Constant fusion has leveled also the social and political relations of the people to one type; it has eliminated primordial groups, except where the dwarf hunters have taken refuge in the equatorial forests and the Bushmen in the southwestern deserts, just as it has thwarted the development of higher social groups by failure to segregate and protect. It has sown the Bantu speech broadcast over the immense area of Central Africa, and is disseminating the Hausa language through the agency of a highly mixed commercial folk over a wide tract of the western Sudan. The long east-and-west stretch of the Sudan grasslands presents an unobstructed zone between the thousand-mile belt of desert to the north and the dense equatorial forests to the south, between hunger and thirst on one side, heat and fever and impenetrable forests on the other. Hence the Sudan in all history has been the crowded Broadway of Africa. Here pass commercial caravans, hybrid merchant tribes like the Hausa, throngs of pilgrims, streams of peoples, herds of cattle moving to busy markets, rude incursive shoppers or looters from the desert, coming to buy or rob or rule in this highway belt. [See map page 105.]

Historical development advances by means of differentiation and assimilation. A change of environment stimulates variation. Primitive culture is loath to change; its inertia is deep-seated. Only a sharp prod will start it moving or accelerate its speed; such a prod is found in new geographic conditions or new social contacts. Divergence in a segregated spot may be overdone. Progress crawls among a people too long isolated, though incipient civilization thrives for a time in seclusion. But in general, accessibility, exposure to some measure of ethnic amalgamation and social contact is essential to sustained progress.226 As the world has become more closely populated and means of communication have improved, geographical segregation is increasingly rare. The earth has lost its "corners." All parts are being drawn into the circle of intercourse. Therefore differentiation, the first effect of the historical movement, abates; the second effect, assimilation, takes the lead.

The ceaseless human movements making for new combinations have stimulated development. They have lifted the level of culture, and worked towards homogeneity of race and civilization on a higher plane. Since the period of the great discoveries inaugurated by Columbus enabled the historical movement to compass the world, whole continents, like North America and Australia, have been reclaimed to civilization by colonization. The process of assimilation is often ruthless in its method. Hence it has been attended by a marked reduction in the number of different ethnic stocks, tribes, languages, dialects, social and cultural types through wide-spread elimination of the weak, backward or unfit.227 These have been wiped out, either by extermination or the slower process of absorption. The Indian linguistic stocks in the United States have been reduced from fifty-three to thirty-two; and of those thirty-two, many survive as a single tribe or the shrinking remnant of one.228 In Africa the slave trade has caused the annihilation of many small tribes.229 The history of the Hottentots, who have been passive before the active advance of the English, Dutch and Kaffirs about them, shows a race undergoing a widespread process of hybridization230 and extermination.231

Strong peoples, like the English, French, Russians and Chinese, occupy ever larger areas. Where an adverse climate precludes genuine colonization, as it did for the Spanish in Central and South America, and for the English and Dutch in the Indies, they make their civilization, if not their race, permeate the acquired territory, and gradually impose on it their language and economic methods. The Poles, who once boasted a large and distinguished nationality, are being Germanized and Russified to their final national extinction. The Finns, whose Scandinavian offshoot has been almost absorbed in Sweden,232 are being forcibly dissolved in the Muscovite dominion by powerful reägents, by Russian schoolmasters, a Russian priesthood, Russian military service.

No new types of races have been developed either by amalgamation or by transfer to new climatic and economic conditions in historic times. Contrasted geographic conditions long ago lost their power to work radical physical changes in the race type, because man even with the beginnings of civilization learned to protect himself against extremes of climate. He therefore preserved his race type, which consequently in the course of ages lost much of its plasticity and therewith its capacity to evolve new varieties.233 Where ethnic amalgamations on a large scale have occurred as a result of the historical movement, as in Mexico, the Sudan and Central Africa, the local race, being numerically stronger than the intruders and better adapted to the environment, has succeeded in maintaining its type, though slightly modified, side by side with the intruders. The great historical movements of modern times, however, have been the expansion of European peoples over the retarded regions of the world. These peoples, coming into contact with inferior races, and armed generally with a race pride which was antagonistic to hybrid marriages, preserved their blood from extensive intermixture. Hybridism, where it existed, was an ephemeral feature restricted to pioneer days, when white women were scarce, or to regions of extreme heat or cold, where white women and children could with difficulty survive. Even in Spanish America, where ethnic blendings were most extensive, something of the old Spanish pride of race has reasserted itself.

Improved communication maintains or increases the ranks of the intruders from the home supply. The negroes in North America, imported as they were en masse, then steadily recruited by two centuries of the slave trade, while their race integrity was somewhat protected by social ostracism, have not been seriously modified physically by several generations of residence in a temperate land. Their changes have been chiefly cultural. The Englishman has altered only superficially in the various British colonial lands. Constant intercourse and the progress of inventions have enabled him to maintain in diverse regions approximate uniformity of physical well-being, similar social and political ideals. The changed environment modifies him in details of thought, manner, and speech, but not in fundamentals.

Moreover, civilized man spreading everywhere and turning all parts of the earth's surface to his uses, has succeeded to some extent in reducing its physical differences. The earth as modified by human action is a conspicuous fact of historical development.234 Irrigation, drainage, fertilization of soils, terrace agriculture, denudation of forests and forestration of prairies have all combined to diminish the contrasts between diverse environments, while the acclimatization of plants, animals and men works even more plainly to the same end of uniformity. The unity of the human race, varied only by superficial differences, reflects the unity of the spherical earth, whose diversities of geographical feature nowhere depart greatly from the mean except in point of climate. Differentiation due to geography, therefore, early reached its limits. For assimilation no limit can be forseen.

In view of this constant differentiation on the one hand, and assimilation on the other, the historical movement has made it difficult to trace race types to their origin; and yet this is a task in which geography must have a hand. Borrowed civilizations and purloined languages are often so many disguises which conceal the truth of ethnic relationships. A long migration to a radically different habitat, into an outskirt or detached location protected from the swamping effects of cross-breeding, results eventually in a divergence great enough to obliterate almost every cue to the ancient kinship. The long-headed Teutonic race of northern Europe is regarded now by ethnologists as an offshoot of the long-headed brunette Mediterranean race of African origin, which became bleached out under the pale suns of Scandinavian skies. The present distribution of the various Teutonic stocks is a geographical fact; their supposed cradle in the Mediterranean basin is a geographical hypothesis. The connecting links must also be geographical. They must prove the former presence of the migrating folk in the intervening territory. A dolichocephalic substratum of population, with a negroid type of skull, has in fact been traced by archaeologists all over Europe through the early and late Stone Ages. The remains of these aboriginal inhabitants are marked in France, even in sparsely tenanted districts like the Auvergne Plateau, which is now occupied by the broad-headed Alpine race; and they are found to underlie, in point of time, other brachycephalic areas, like the Po Valley, Bavaria and Russia.235

The origin of a people can be investigated and stated only in terms of geography. The problem of origin can be solved only by tracing a people from its present habitat, through the country over which it has migrated, back to its original seat. Here are three geographical entities which can be laid down upon a map, though seldom with sharply defined boundaries. They represent three successive geographic locations, all embodying geographic conditions potent to influence the people and their movement. Hence the geographical element emerges in every investigation as to origins; whether in ethnology, history, philology, mythology or religion. The transit land, the course between start and finish, is of supreme importance. Especially is this true for religion, which is transformed by travel. Christianity did not conquer the world in the form in which it issued from the cramped and isolated environment of Palestine, but only after it had been remodelled in Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and cosmopolized in the wide contact of the Mediterranean basin. The Roman speech and civilization, which spread through the Romance speaking peoples of Europe, were variously diluted and alloyed before being transplanted by French, Spaniard and Portuguese to American shores, there to be further transformed.

In view of the countless springs and tributaries that combine to swell the current of every historical movement, anthropo-geography looks for the origin of a people not in a narrowly defined area, but in a broad, ill-defined center of dispersion, from which many streams simultaneously and successively flow out as from a low-rimmed basin, and which has been filled from many remoter sources. Autochthones, aborigines are therefore merely scientific tropes, indicating the limit beyond which the movement of people cannot be traced in the gray light of an uncertain dawn. The vaguer and more complex these movements on account of their historical remoteness, the wider their probable range. The question as to the geographical origin of the Aryan linguistic family of peoples brings us to speculative sources, more or less scientifically based, reaching from Scandinavia and Lithuania to the Hindu Kush Mountains and northern Africa.236 The sum total of all these conjectural cradles, amounting to a large geographical area, would more nearly approximate the truth as to Aryan origins. For the study of the historical movement makes it clear that a large, highly differentiated ethnic or linguistic family presupposes a big center end a long period of dispersion, protracted wanderings, and a diversified area both for their migrations and successive settlements.

The slighter the inner differences in an ethnic stock, whether in culture, language or physical traits, the smaller was their center of distribution and the more rapid their dispersal. The small initial habitat restricts the chances of variation through isolation and contrasted geographic conditions, as does also the short duration of their subsequent separation. The amazing uniformity of the Eskimo type from Bering Strait to eastern Greenland can only thus be explained, even after making allowance for the monotony of their geographic conditions and remoteness from outside influences. The distribution of the Bantu dialects over so wide a region in Central Africa and with such slight divergences presupposes narrow limits both of space and time for their origin, and a short period since their dispersal.237

Small centers of dispersion are generally natural districts with fixed boundaries, favored by their geographical location or natural resources or by both for the development of a relatively dense population. When this increases beyond the local limits of subsistence, there follows an emigration in point of number and duration out of all proportion to the small area whence it issues. Ancient Phoenicia, Crete, Samos, mediæval Norway, Venice, Yemen, modern Malta, Gilbert Islands, England and Japan furnish examples. Such small favored areas, when they embody also strong political power, may get the start in the occupation of colonial lands. This gives them a permanent advantage, if their colonies are chosen with a view to settlement in congenial climates, as were those of the English, rather than the more ephemeral advantage of trade, as were those of the Dutch and Portuguese in the Tropics. It seems also essential to these centers of dispersion, that, to be effective, they must command the wide choice of outlet and destination afforded by the mighty common of the sea. Only the Inca Empire in South America gives us an example of the extensive political expansion of a small mountain state.

The question arises whether any single rule can as yet be formulated for identifying the original seats of existing peoples. By some ethnologists and historians such homes have been sought where the people are distributed in the largest area, as the Athapascan and Algonquin Indians are assigned to a northern source, because their territories attained their greatest continuous extent in Canada, but were intermittent or attenuated farther south. The fact that colonial peoples often multiply inordinately in new lands, and there occupy a territory vastly greater than that of the mother country, points to the danger in such a generalization. Of the ten millions of Jews in the world, only a handful remain in the ancient center of dispersion in Palestine, while about eight millions are found in Poland and the contiguous territories of western Russia, Roumania, Austria-Hungary and eastern Germany. Moreover, history and the German element in the "Yiddish" speech of the Russian Jews point to a secondary center of dispersion in the Rhine cities and Franconia, whither the Jews were drawn by the trade route up the Rhone Valley in the third century.238

A more scientific procedure is to look for the early home of a race in the locality around which its people or family of peoples centers in modern times. Therefore we place the cradle of the negro race in Africa, rather than Melanesia. Density often supplies a test, because colonial lands are generally more sparsely inhabited than the mother country. But even this conclusion fails always to apply, as in the case of Samos, which has a population vastly more dense than any section of the Grecian mainland. The largest compact area including at once the greatest density of population and the greatest purity of race would more nearly indicate the center of dispersion; because purity of race is incompatible with long migrations, as we have seen, though in the native seat it may be affected by intrusive elements. When this purity of race is combined with archaic forms of language and culture, as among the Lithuanians of Aryan speech among the Baltic swamps, it may indicate that the locality formed a segregated corner of the early center of dispersion. It seems essential to such an original seat that, whether large or small, it should be marked by some degree of isolation, as the condition for the development of specific racial characteristics.

The complexity of this question of ethnic origins is typical of anthropo-geographic problems, typical also in the warning which it gives against any rigidly systematic method of solution. The whole science of anthropo-geography is as yet too young for hard-and-fast rules, and its subject matter too complex for formulas.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

The location of a country or people is always the supreme geographical fact in its history. It outweighs every other single geographic force. All that has been said of Russia's vast area, of her steppes and tundra wastes, of her impotent seaboard on land-locked basins or ice-bound coasts, of her poverty of mountains and wealth of rivers, fades into the background before her location on the border of Asia. From her defeat by the Tartar hordes in 1224 to her attack upon the Mongolian rulers of the Bosporus in 1877, and her recent struggle with Japan, most of her wars have been waged against Asiatics. Location made her the bulwark of Central Europe against Asiatic invasion and the apostle of Western civilization to the heart of Asia. If this position on the outskirts of Europe, remote from its great centers of development, has made Russia only partially accessible to European culture and, furthermore, has subjected her to the retarding ethnic and social influences emanating from her Asiatic neighbors,239 and if the rough tasks imposed by her frontier situation have hampered her progress, these are all the limitations of her geographical location, limitations which not even the advantage of her vast area has been able to outweigh.

Area itself, important as it is, must yield to location. Location may mean only a single spot, and yet from this spot powerful influences may radiate. No one thinks of size when mention is made of Rome or Athens, of Jerusalem or Mecca, of Gibraltar or Port Arthur. Iceland and Greenland guided early Norse ships to the continent of America, as the Canaries and Antilles did those of Spain; but the location of the smaller islands in sub-tropical latitudes and in the course of the northeast trade-winds made them determine the first permanent path across the western seas.

The historical significance of many small peoples, and the historical insignificance of many big ones even to the nil point, is merely the expression of the preponderant importance of location over area. The Phoenicians, from their narrow strip of coast at the foot of Mount Lebanon, were disseminators of culture over the whole Mediterranean. Holland owed her commercial and maritime supremacy, from the thirteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, to her exceptional position at the mouth of the great Rhine highway and at the southern angle of the North Sea near the entrance to the unexploited regions of the Baltic. The Iroquois tribes, located where the Mohawk Valley opened a way through the Appalachian barrier between the Hudson River and Lake Ontario, occupied both in the French wars and in the Revolution a strategic position which gave them a power and importance out of all proportion to their numbers.

Location often assumes a fictitious political value, due to a combination of political interests. The Turkish power owes its survival on the soil of Europe to-day wholly to its position on the Bosporus. Holland owes the integrity of her kingdom, and Roumania that of hers, to their respective locations at the mouths of the Rhine and the Danube, because the interest of western Europe demands that these two important arteries of commerce should be held by powers too weak ever to tie them up. The same principle has guaranteed the neutrality of Switzerland, whose position puts it in control of the passes of the Central Alps from Savoy to the Tyrol; and, more recently, that of the young state of Panama, through which the Isthmian Canal is to pass.

Geographical location necessarily includes the idea of the size and form of a country. Even the most general statement of the zonal and interoceanic situation of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Russian Empire, indicates the area and contour of their territories. This is still more conspicuously the case with naturally defined regions, such as island and peninsula countries. But location includes a complex of yet larger and more potent relations which go with mere attachment to this or that continent, or to one or another side of a continent. Every part of the world gives to its lands and its people some of its own qualities; and so again every part of this part. Arabia, India and Farther India, spurs of the Asiatic land-mass, have had and will always have a radically different ethnic and political history from Greece, Italy and Spain, the corresponding peninsulas of Europe, because the histories of these two groups are bound up in their respective continents. The idea of a European state has a different content from that of an Asiatic, or North American or African state; it includes a different race or combination of races, different social and economic development, different political ideals. Location, therefore, means climate and plant life at one end of the scale, civilization and political status at the other.

This larger conception of location brings a correspondingly larger conception of environment, which affords the solution of many otherwise hopeless problems of anthropo-geography. It is embodied in the law that the influences of a land upon its people spring not only from the physical features of the land itself, but also from a wide circle of lands into which it has been grouped by virtue of its location. Almost every geographical interpretation of the ancient and modern history of Greece has been inadequate, because it has failed sufficiently to emphasize the most essential factor in this history, namely, Greece's location at the threshold of the Orient. This location has given to Greek history a strong Asiatic color. It comes out in the accessibility of Greece to ancient Oriental civilization and commerce, and is conspicuous in every period from the Argonautic Expedition to the achievement of independence in 1832 and the recent efforts for the liberation of Crete. This outpost location before the Mediterranean portals of the vast and arid plains of southwestern Asia, exposed to every tide of migration or conquest sent out by those hungry lands, had in it always an element of weakness. In comparison with the shadow of Asia, which constantly overhung the Greek people and from 1401 to 1832 enveloped them, only secondary importance can be attributed to advantageous local conditions as factors in Greek history.

It is a similar intercontinental location in the isthmian region between the Mediterranean on the west and the ancient maritime routes of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf on the east, which gave to Phoenicia the office of middleman between the Orient and Occident,240 and predestined its conquest, now by the various Asiatic powers of Mesopotamia, now by the Pharaohs of Egypt, now by European Greeks and Romans, now by a succession of Asiatic peoples, till to-day we find it incorporated in the Asiatic-European Empire of Turkey. Proximity to Africa has closely allied Spain to the southern continent in flora, fauna, and ethnic stock. The long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race occupies the Iberian Peninsula and the Berber territory of northwest Africa.241 This community of race is also reflected in the political union of the two districts for long periods, first under the Carthaginians, then the Romans, who secured Hispania by a victory on African soil, and finally by the Saracens. This same African note in Spanish history recurs to-day in Spain's interest in Morocco and the influence in Moroccan affairs yielded her by France and Germany at the Algeciras convention in 1905, and in her ownership of Ceuta and five smaller presidios on the Moroccan coast. Compare Portugal's former ownership of Tangier.

In contradistinction to continental and intercontinental location, anthropo-geography recognizes two other narrower meanings of the term. The innate mobility of the human race, due primarily to the eternal food-quest and increase of numbers, leads a people to spread out over a territory till they reach the barriers which nature has set up, or meet the frontiers of other tribes and nations. Their habitat or their specific geographic location is thus defined by natural features of mountain, desert and sea, or by the neighbors whom they are unable to displace, or more often by both.

A people has, therefore, a twofold location, an immediate one, based upon their actual territory, and a mediate or vicinal one, growing out of its relations to the countries nearest them. The first is a question of the land under their feet; the other, of the neighbors about them. The first or natural location embodies the complex of local geographic conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an oasis, an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The stronger the vicinal location, the more dependent is the people upon the neighboring states, but the more potent the influence which it can, under certain circumstances, exert upon them. Witness Germany in relation to Holland, France, Austria and Poland. The stronger the natural location, on the other hand, the more independent is the people and the more strongly marked is the national character. This is exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia and Nepal; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain and Scandinavia; and of islands like England and Japan. To-day we stand amazed at that strong primordial brand of the Japanese character which nothing can blur or erase.

Clearly defined natural locations, in which barriers of mountains and sea draw the boundaries and guarantee some degree of isolation, tend to hold their people in a calm embrace, to guard them against outside interference and infusion of foreign blood, and thus to make them develop the national genius in such direction as the local geographic conditions permit. In the unceasing movements which have made up most of the historic and prehistoric life of the human race, in their migrations and counter-migrations, their incursions, retreats, and expansions over the face of the earth, vast unfenced areas, like the open lowlands of Russia and the grasslands of Africa, present the picture of a great thoroughfare swept by pressing throngs. Other regions, more secluded, appear as quiet nooks, made for a temporary halt or a permanent rest. Here some part of the passing human flow is caught as in a vessel and held till it crystallizes into a nation. These are the conspicuous areas of race characterization. The development of the various ethnic and political offspring of the Roman Empire in the naturally defined areas of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and France illustrates the process of national differentiation which goes on in such secluded locations.

A marked influence upon this development is generally ascribed to the protection afforded by such segregated districts. But protection alone is only a negative force in the life of a people; it leaves them free to develop in their own way, but does not say what that way shall be. On the other hand, the fact that such a district embraces a certain number of geographic features, and encompasses them by obstructive boundaries, is of immense historical importance; because this restriction leads to the concentration of the national powers, to the more thorough utilization of natural advantages, both racial and geographical, and thereby to the growth of an historical individuality. Nothing robs the historical process of so much of its greatness or weakens so much its effects as its dispersion over a wide, boundless area. This was the disintegrating force which sapped the strength of the French colonies in America. The endless valleys of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi and the alluring fur trade tempted them to an expansion that was their political and economic undoing. Russia's history illustrates the curse of a distant horizon. On the other hand, out of a restricted geographical base, with its power to concentrate and intensify the national forces, grew Rome and Greece, England and Japan, ancient Peru and the Thirteen Colonies of America.

If even the most detached and isolated of these natural locations be examined, its people will, nevertheless, reveal a transitional character, intermediate between those of its neighbors, because from these it has borrowed both ethnic stock and culture, Great Britain is an island, but its vicinal location groups it with the North Sea family of people. Even in historic times it has derived ancient Belgian stock, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Scandinavian from the long semi-circle of nearby continental lands, which have likewise contributed so much to the civilization of the island. Similarly, Japan traces the sources of its population to the north of Asia by way of the island of Sakhalin, to the west through Korea, and to the Malay district of the south, whence the Kuro Siwa has swept stragglers to the shores of Kiu-siu. Like England, Japan also has drawn its civilization from its neighbors, and then, under the isolating influence of its local environment, has individualized both race and culture. Here we have the interplay of the forces of natural and vicinal location.

A people situated between two other peoples form an ethnic and cultural link between the two. The transitional type is as familiar in anthropo-geography as in biology. The only exception is found in the young intrusion of a migrating or conquering people, like that of the Hungarians and Turks in southeastern Europe, and of the Berger Tuaregs and Fulbes among the negroes of western Sudan; or of a colonizing people, like that of the Russians in Mongolian Siberia and of Europeans among the aborigines of South Africa. Even in these instances race amalgamation tends to take place along the frontiers, as was the case in Latin America and as occurs to-day in Alaska and northern Canada, where the "squaw man" is no rarity. The assimilation of culture, at least in a superficial sense, may be yet more rapid, especially where hard climatic conditions force the interloper to imitate the life of the native. The industrial and commercial Hollander, when transplanted to the dry grasslands of South Africa, became pastoral like the native Kaffirs. The French voyageur of Canada could scarcely be distinguished from the Indian trapper; occupation, food, dress, and spouse were the same. Only a lighter tint of skin distinguished the half-breed children of the Frenchman. The settlers of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths, at least for a generation or two, showed little outward difference in mode of life from that of the savage community among which they dwelt.242

The more alike the components of such a vicinal group of people, the easier, freer and more effective will be the mediating function of the central one. Germany has demonstrated this in her long history as intermediary between the nations of southeastern and western Europe. The people of Poland, occupying a portion of the Baltic slope of northern Europe, fended by no natural barriers from their eastern and western neighbors, long constituted a transition form between the two. Though affiliated with Russia in point of language, the Poles are Occidental in their religion; and their head-form resembles that of northern Germany rather than that of Russia.243 The country belongs to western Europe in the density of its population (74 to the square kilometer or 190 to the square mile), which is quadruple that of remaining European Russia, and also in its industrial and social development. The partition of Poland among the three neighboring powers was the final expression of its intermediate location and character.244 One part was joined politically to the Slav-German western border of Russia, and another to the German-Slav border of Germany, while the portion that fell to the Austrian Empire simply extended the northern Slav area of that country found in Bohemia, Moravia, and the Slovak border of Hungary. [Map page 223.]

If the intermediate people greatly differs in race or civilization from both neighbors, it exercises and receives slight influence. The Mongols of Central Asia, between China on one side and Persia and India on the other, have been poor vehicles for the exchange of culture between these two great districts. The Hungarians, located between the Roumanians and Germans on the east and west, Slovaks and Croatians on the north and south, have helped little to reconcile race differences in the great empire of the Danube.

The unifying effect of vicinal location is greatly enhanced if the neighboring people are grouped about an enclosed sea which affords an easy highway for communication. The integrating force of such a basin will often overcome the disintegrating force of race antagonisms. The Roman Empire in the Mediterranean was able to evolve an effective centralized government and to spread one culture over the neighboring shores, despite great variety of nationality and language and every degree of cultural development. A certain similarity of natural conditions, climatic and otherwise, from the Iberian Peninsula to the borders of the Syrian desert, also aided in the process of amalgamation.

Where similarity of race already forms a basis for congeniality, such circumthalassic groups display the highest degree of interactive influence. These contribute to a further blending of population and unification of culture, by which the whole circle of the enclosing lands tends to approach one standard of civilization. This was the history of the Baltic coast from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, when the German Hansa distributed the material products of Europe's highest civilization from Russian Novgorod to Norway. The North Sea group, first under the leadership of Holland, later under England's guidance, became a single community of advancing culture, which was a later reflection of the early community of race stretching from the Faroe and Shetland Islands to the Rhine and the Elbe. This same process has been going on for ages about the marginal basins of eastern Asia, the Yellow and Japan Seas. Community of race and culture stamps China, Korea and Japan. A general advance in civilization under the leadership of Japan, the England of the East, now inaugurates the elevation of the whole group.

An even closer connection exists between adjoining peoples who are united by ties of blood and are further made economically dependent upon one another, because of a contrast in the physical conditions and, therefore, in the products of their respective territories. Numerous coast and inland tribes, pastoral and agricultural tribes are united because they are mutually necessary. In British Columbia and Alaska the fishing Indians of the seaboard long held a definite commercial relation to the hunting tribes of the interior, selling them the products and wares of the coast, while monopolizing their market for the inland furs. Such was the position of the Ugalentz tribe of Tlingits near the mouth of the Copper River in relation to the up-stream Athapascans; of the Kinik tribe at the head of Cook's Inlet in relation to the inland Atnas,245 of the Chilcats of Chilkoot Inlet to the mountain Tinnehs. Similarly, the hunting folk of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa attach themselves to influential tribesmen of the adjacent Bechuana grasslands, in order to exchange the skins of the desert animals for spears, knives, and tobacco.246 Fertile agricultural lands adjoining pastoral regions of deserts and steppes have in all times drawn to their border markets the mounted plainsmen, bringing the products of their herds to exchange for grain; and in all times the abundance of their green fields has tempted their ill-fed neighbors to conquest, so that the economic bond becomes a preliminary to a political bond and an ethnic amalgamation growing out of this strong vicinal location. The forest lands of Great Russia supplement the grain-bearing Black Lands of Little Russia; the two are united through geographico-economic conditions, which would not permit an independent existence to the smaller, weaker section of the south, ever open to hostile invasion from Asia.247

Leaving now the ethnic and economic ties which may strengthen the cohesive power of such vicinal grouping, and considering only its purely geographic aspects, we distinguish the following types:

All peoples in their geographical distribution tend to follow a social and political law of gravitation, in accordance with which members of the same tribe or race gather around a common center or occupy a continuous stretch of territory, as compactly as their own economic status, and the physical conditions of climate and soil will permit. This is characteristic of all mature and historically significant peoples who have risen to sedentary life, maintained their hold on a given territory, and, with increase of population, have widened their boundaries. The nucleus of such a people may be situated somewhere in the interior of a continent, and with growing strength it may expand in every direction; or it may originate on some advantageous inlet of the sea and spread thence up and down the coast, till the people have possessed themselves of a long-drawn hem of land and used this peripheral location to intercept the trade between their back country and the sea.

These are the two types of continuous location. In contrast to them, a discontinuous or scattered location characterizes the sparse distribution of primitive hunting and pastoral tribes; or the shattered fragments of a conquered people, whose territory has been honeycombed by the land appropriation of the victors; or a declining, moribund people, who, owing to bad government, poor economic methods, and excessive competition in the struggle for existence, have shrunk to mere patches. As a favorable symptom, scattered location regularly marks the healthy growth of an expanding people, who throw out here and there detached centers of settlement far beyond the compact frontier, and fix these as the goal for the advance of their boundary. It is also a familiar feature of maritime commercial expansion, which is guided by no territorial ambition but merely aims to secure widely distributed trading stations at favorable coast points, in order to make the circle of commerce as ample and resourceful as possible. But this latter form of scattered location is not permanently sound. Back of it lies the short-sighted policy of the middleman nation, which makes wholly inadequate estimate of the value of land, and is content with an ephemeral prosperity.

A broad territorial base and security of possession are the guarantees of national survival. The geographic conditions which favor one often operate against the other. Peripheral location means a narrow base but a protected frontier along the sea; central location means opportunity for widening the territory, but it also means danger. A state embedded in the heart of a continent has, if strong, every prospect of radial expansion and the exercise of widespread influence; but if weak, its very existence is imperilled, because it is exposed to encroachments on every side. A central location minus the bulwark of natural boundaries enabled the kingdom of Poland to be devoured piecemeal by its voracious neighbors. The kingdom of Burgundy, always a state of fluctuating boundaries and shifting allegiances, fell at last a victim to its central location, and saw its name obliterated from the map. Hungary, which, in the year 1000, occupied a restricted inland location on the middle Danube, by the 14th century broke through the barriers of its close-hugging neighbors, and stretched its boundaries from the Adriatic to the Euxine; two hundred years later its territory contracted to a fragment before the encroachments of the Turks, but afterwards recovered in part its old dimensions. Germany has, in common with the little Sudanese state of Wadai, an influential and dangerous position. A central location in the Sudan has made Wadai accessible to the rich caravan trade from Tripoli and Barca on the north, from the great market town of Kano in Sokoto on the west, and from the Nile Valley and Red Sea on the east. But the little state has had to fight for its life against the aggressions of its western rival Bornu and its eastern neighbor Darfur. And now more formidable enemies menace it in the French, who have occupied the territory between it and Bornu, and the English, who have already caught Darfur in the dragnet of the Egyptian Sudan.248

Germany, crowded in among three powerful neighbors like France, Russia, and Austria, has had no choice about maintaining a strong standing army and impregnable frontier defenses. The location of the Central European states between the Baltic and the Balkans has exposed them to all the limitations and dangers arising from a narrow circle of land neighbors. Moreover, the diversified character of the area, its complex mountain systems, and diverging river courses have acted as disintegrating forces which have prevented the political concentration necessary to repel interference from without. The Muscovite power, which had its beginning in a modest central location about the sources of the Dwina, Dnieper and Volga, was aided by the physical unity of its unobstructed plains, which facilitated political combination. Hence, on every side it burst through its encompassing neighbors and stretched its boundaries to the untenanted frontier of the sea. Central location was the undoing of the Transvaal Republic. Its efforts to expand to the Indian Ocean were blocked by its powerful British rival at every point—at Delagoa Bay in 1875 by treaty with Portugal, at Santa Lucia Bay in 1884, and through Swaziland in 1894. The Orange Free State was maimed in the same way when, in 1868, she tried to stretch out an arm through Basutoland to the sea.249 Here even weak neighbors were effective to curtail the seaward growth of these inland states, because they were made the tools of one strong, rapacious neighbor. A central position teaches always the lesson of vigilance and preparedness for hostilities, as the Boer equipment in 1899, the military organization of Germany, and the bristling fortresses on the Swiss Alpine passes prove.

How intimate and necessary are the relations between central and peripheral location is shown by the fact that all states strive to combine the two. In countries like Norway, France, Spain, Japan, Korea and Chile, peripheral location predominates, and therefore confers upon them at once the security and commercial accessibility which result from contact with the sea. Other countries, like Russia, Germany and Austro-Hungary, chiefly central in location, have the strategic and even the commercial value of their coasts reduced by the long, tortuous course which connects them with the open ocean. Therefore, we find Russia planning to make a great port at Ekaterina Harbor on the northernmost point of her Lapland coast, where an out-runner from the Gulf Stream ensures an ice-free port on the open sea.250 An admirable combination of central and peripheral location is seen in the United States. Here the value of periphery is greatly enhanced by the interoceanic location of the country; and the danger of entanglements arising from a marked central location is reduced by the simplicity of the political neighborhood. But our country has paid for this security by an historical aloofness and poverty of influence. Civilized countries which are wholly central in their location are very few, only nine in all. Six of these are mountain or plateau states, like Switzerland and Abyssinia, which have used the fortress character of their land to resist conquest, and have preferred independence to the commercial advantages to be gained only by affiliation with their peripheral neighbors.

Central and peripheral location presuppose and supplement one another. One people inhabits the interior of an island or continent whose rim is occupied by another. The first suffers from exclusion from the sea and therefore strives to get a strip of coast. The coast people feel the drawback of their narrow foothold upon the land, want a broader base in order to exploit fully the advantages of their maritime location, fear the pressure of their hinterland when the great forces there imprisoned shall begin to move; so they tend to expand inland to strengthen themselves and weaken the neighbor in their rear. The English colonies of America, prior to 1763, held a long cordon of coast, hemmed in between the Appalachian Mountains and the sea. Despite threats of French encroachments from the interior, they expanded from this narrow peripheral base into the heart of the continent, and after the Revolution reached the Mississippi River and the northern boundary of the Spanish Floridas. They now held a central location in relation to the long Spanish periphery of the Gulf of Mexico. True to the instincts of that location, they began to throw the weight of their vast hinterland against the weak coastal barrier. This gave way, either to forcible appropriation of territory or diplomacy or war, till the United States had incorporated in her own territory the peripheral lands of the Gulf from Florida Strait to the Rio Grande. [See map page 156.]

In Asia this same process has been perennial and on a far greater scale. The big arid core of that continent, containing many million square miles, has been charged with an expansive force. From the appearance of the Aryans in the Indus Valley and the Scythians on the borders of Macedonia, it has sent out hordes to overwhelm the peripheral lands from the Yellow Sea to the Black, and from the Indian Ocean to the White Sea.251 To-day Russia is making history there on the pattern set by geographic conditions. From her most southerly province in Trans-Caspia, conquered a short twenty-five years ago, she is heading towards the Indian Ocean. The Anglo-Russian convention of August 31st, 1907, yielding to Russia all northern Persia as her sphere of influence, enables her to advance half way to the Persian Gulf, though British statesmen regard it as a check upon her ambition, because England has secured right to the littoral. But Russia by this great stride toward her goal is working with causes, satisfied to let the effects follow at their leisure. She has gained the best portion of Persia, comprising the six largest cities and the most important lines of communication radiating from the capital.252 This country will make a solid base for her further advance to the Persian Gulf; and, when developed by Russian enterprise in railroad building and commerce, it will make a heavy weight bearing down upon the coast. The Muscovite area which is pressing upon England's Persian littoral reaches from Ispahan and Yezd to the far-away shores of the Arctic Ocean.

In the essentially complementary character of interior and periphery are rooted all these coastward and landward movements of expansion. Where an equilibrium seems to have been reached, the peoples who have accepted either the one or the other one-sided location have generally for the time being ceased to grow. Such a location has therefore a passive character. But the surprising elasticity of many nations may start up an unexpected activity which will upset this equilibrium. Where the central location is that of small mountain states, which are handicapped by limited resources and population, like Nepal and Afghanistan, or overshadowed by far more powerful neighbors, like Switzerland, the passive character is plain enough. In the case of larger states, like Servia, Abyssinia, and Bolivia, which offer the material and geographical base for larger populations than they now support, it is often difficult to say whether progression or retrogression is to be their fate. As a rule, however, the expulsion of a people from a peripheral point of advantage and their confinement in the interior gives the sign of national decay, as did Poland's loss of her Baltic seaboard. Russia's loss of her Manchurian port and the resignation of her ambition on the Chinese coasts is at least a serious check. On the other hand, if an inland country enclosed by neighbors succeeds in somewhere getting a maritime outlet, the sign is hopeful. The century-old political slogan of Hungary, "To the sea, Magyars!" has borne fruit in the Adriatic harbor of Fiume, which is to-day the pride of the nation and in no small degree a basis for its hope of autonomy. The history of Montenegro took on a new phase when from its mountain seclusion it recently secured the short strip of seaboard which it had won and lost so often. Such peripheral holdings are the lungs through which states breathe.

History and the study of race distribution reveal a mass of facts which represent the contrast and reaction between interior and periphery. The marginal lands of Asia, from northern Japan, where climatic conditions first make historical development possible, around the whole fringe of islands, peninsulas and border lowlands to the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, present a picture of culture and progress as compared with the high, mountain-rimmed core of the continent, condemned by its remoteness and inaccessibility to eternal retardation. Europe shows the same contrast, though in less pronounced form. Its ragged periphery, all the way from the Balkan Gibraltar at Constantinople to the far northern projections of Scandinavia and Finland, shows the value of a seaward outlook both in culture and climate. Germany beyond the Elbe and Austria beyond the Danube begin to feel the shadow of the continental mass behind them; and from their eastern borders on through Russia the benumbing influence of a central location grows, till beyond the Volga the climatic, economic, social and political conditions of Asia prevail. Africa is all core: contour and relief have combined to reduce its periphery to a narrow coastal hem, offering at best a few vantage points for exploitation to the great maritime merchant peoples of the world. Egypt, embedded in an endless stretch of desert like a jewel in its matrix, was powerless to shake off the influence of its continental environment. Its location was predominantly central; its culture bore the stamp of isolation and finally of arrested development. Australia, the classic ground of retardation, where only shades of savagery can be distinguished, offered the natives of its northern coast some faint stimuli in the visits of Malay seamen from the nearby Sunda Islands; but its central tribes, shielded by geographic segregation from external influences, have retained the most primitive customs and beliefs.253

Expanding Europe has long been wrestling with Africa, but it can not get a grip, owing to the form of its antagonist; it finds no limb by which the giant can be tripped and thrown. Asia presents a wide border of marginal lands, some of them like Arabia and India being almost continental in their proportions. Since Europe began her career of maritime and colonial expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she has seized upon these peripheral projections as if they were the handles on a pilot wheel, and by them she has steered the course of Asia ever since. These semi-detached outlyers of the continent have enabled her to stretch a girdle of European influences around the central core. Such influences, through the avenues of commerce, railway concessions, missionary propaganda, or political dominion, have permeated the accessible periphery and are slowly spreading thence into the interior. China and Persia have felt these influences not less than India and Tongking; Japan, which has most effectually preserved its political autonomy, has profited by them most.

This historical contrast between center and periphery of continents reappears in smaller land masses, such as peninsulas and islands. The principle holds good regardless of size. The whole fringe of Arabia, from Antioch to Aden and from Mocha to Mascat, has been the scene of incoming and outgoing activities, has developed live bases of trade, maritime growth, and culture, while the inert, somnolent interior has drowsed away its long eventless existence. The rugged, inaccessible heart of little Sardinia repeats the story of central Arabia in its aloofness, its impregnability, backwardness, and in the purity of its race. Its accessible coast, forming a convenient way-station on the maritime crossroads of the western Mediterranean, has received a succession of conquerors and an intermittent influx of every ethnic strain known in the great basin.

The story of discovery and colonization, from the days of ancient Greek enterprise in the Mediterranean to the recent German expansion along the Gulf of Guinea, shows the appropriation first of the rims of islands and continents, and later that of the interior. A difference of race and culture between inland and peripheral inhabitants meets us almost everywhere in retarded colonial lands. In the Philippines, the wild people of Luzon, Mindoro and the Visayas are confined almost entirely to the interior, while civilized or Christianized Malays occupy the whole seaboard, except where the rugged Sierra Madre Mountains, fronting the Pacific in Luzon, harbor a sparse population of primitive Negritos.254 For centuries Arabs held the coast of East Africa, where their narrow zone of settlement bordered on that of native blacks, with whom they traded. Even ancient Greece showed a wide difference in type of character and culture between the inland and maritime states. The Greek landsman was courageous and steadfast, but crude, illiterate, unenterprising, showing sterility of imagination and intellect; while his brother of the seaboard was active, daring, mercurial, imaginative, open to all the influences of a refining civilization.255 To-day the distribution of the Greeks along the rim of the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor, in contrast to the Turks and Slavs of the interior, is distinctly a peripheral phenomenon.256

The rapid inland advance from the coast of oversea colonists is part of that restless activity which is fostered by contact with the sea and supported by the command of abundant resources conferred by maritime superiority. The Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, as later the English colonization of America, seized the rim of the land, and promptly pushed up the rivers in sea-going boats far into the interior. But periphery may give to central region something more than conquerors and colonists. From its active markets and cosmopolitan exchanges there steadily filter into the interior culture and commodities, carried by peaceful merchant and missionary, who, however, are often only the harbingers of the conqueror. The accessibility of the periphery tends to raise it in culture, wealth, density of population, and often in political importance, far in advance of the center.

Philippine Islands. Distribution of Civilized and Wild Peoples

The maritime periphery of a country receives a variety of oversea influences, blends and assimilates these to its own culture, Hellenizes, Americanizes or Japanizes them, as the case may be, and then passes them on into the interior. Here no one foreign influence prevails. On the land boundaries the case is different. Each inland frontier has to reckon with a different neighbor and its undiluted influence. A predominant central location means a succession of such neighbors, on all sides friction which may polish or rub sore. The distinction between a many-sided and a one-sided historical development depends upon the contact of a people with its neighbors. Consider the multiplicity of influences which have flowed in upon Austria from all sides. But not all such influences are similar in kind or in degree. The most powerful neighbor will chiefly determine on which boundary of a country its dominant historical processes are to work themselves out in a given epoch. Therefore, it is of supreme importance to the character of a peopled history on which side this most powerful neighbor is located. Russia had for several centuries such a neighbor in the Tartar hordes along its southeastern frontier, and therefore its history received an Asiatic stamp; so, too, did that of Austria and Hungary in the long resistance to Turkish invasion. All three states suffered in consequence a retardation of development on their western sides. After the turmoil on the Asiatic frontier had subsided, the great centers of European culture and commerce in Italy, Germany and the Baltic lands began to assert their powers of attraction. The young Roman Republic drew up its forces to face the threatening power of Carthage in the south, and thereby was forced into rapid maritime development; the Roman Empire faced north to meet the inroads of the barbarians, and thereby was drawn into inland expansion. All these instances show that a vital historical turning-point is reached in the development of every country, when the scene of its great historical happenings shifts from one side to another.

In addition to the aggressive neighbor, there is often a more sustained force that may draw the activities of a people toward one or another boundary of their territory. This may be the abundance of land and unexploited resources lying on a colonial frontier and attracting the unemployed energies of the people, such as existed till recently in the United States,257 and such as is now transferring the most active scenes of Russian history to far-away Siberia. But a stronger attraction is that of a higher civilization and dominant economic interests. So long as the known world was confined to the temperate regions of Europe, Asia and Africa, together with the tropical districts of the Indian Ocean, the necessities of trade between Orient and Occident and the historical prestige of the lands bordering on the Mediterranean placed in this basin the center of gravity of the cultural, commercial and political life of Europe. The continent was dominated by its Asiatic corner; its every country took on an historical significance proportionate to its proximity and accessibility to this center. The Papacy was a Mediterranean power. The Crusades were Mediterranean wars. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Venice, and Genoa held in turn the focal positions in this Asiatic-European sea; they were on the sunny side of the continent, while Portugal and England lay in shadow. Only that portion of Britain facing France felt the cultural influences of the southern lands. The estuaries of the Mersey and Clyde were marshy solitudes, echoing to the cry of the bittern and the ripple of Celtic fishing-boat.

After the year 1492 inaugurated the Atlantic period of history, the western front of Europe superseded the Mediterranean side in the historical leadership of the continent. The Breton coast of France waked up, the southern seaboard dozed. The old centers in the Aegean and Adriatic became drowsy corners. The busy traffic of the Mediterranean was transferred to the open ocean, where, from Trafalger to Norway, the western states of Europe held the choice location on the world's new highway. Liverpool, Plymouth, Glasgow, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Cherbourg, Lisbon and Cadiz were shifted from shadowy margin to illuminated center, and became the foci of the new activity. Theirs was a new continental location, maintaining relations of trade and colonization with two hemispheres. Their neighbors were now found on the Atlantic shores of the Americas and the peripheral lands of Asia. These cities became the exponents of the intensity with which their respective states exploited the natural advantages of this location.

The experience of Germany was typical of the change of front. From the tenth to the middle of the sixteenth century, this heir of the old Roman Empire was drawn toward Italy by every tie of culture, commerce, and political ideal. This concentration of interest in its southern neighbor made it ignore a fact so important as the maritime development of the Hanse Towns, wherein lay the real promise of its future, the hope of its commercial and colonial expansion. The shifting of its historical center of gravity to the Atlantic seaboard therefore came late, further retarded by lack of national unity and national purposes. But the present wide circle of Germany's transoceanic commerce incident upon its recent industrial development, the phenomenal increase of its merchant marine, the growth of Hamburg and Bremen, the construction of ship canals to that short North Sea coast, and the enormous utilization of Dutch ports for German commerce, all point to the attraction of distant economic interests, even when meagerly supported by colonial possessions.

Location, therefore, while it is the most important single geographic factor, is at the same time the one most subject to the vicissitudes attending the anthropo-geographical evolution of the earth. Its value changes with the transfer of the seats of the higher civilizations from sub-tropical to temperate lands; from the margin of enclosed sea to the hem of the open ocean; from small, naturally defined territories to large, elastic areas; from mere periphery to a combination of periphery and interior, commanding at once the freedom of the sea and the resources of a wide hinterland.

Even in Europe, however, where the Atlantic leaning of all the states is so marked as to suggest a certain dependence, the strength of this one-sided attraction is weakened by the complexity and closeness of the vicinal grouping of the several nations. Germany's reliance upon the neighboring grain fields of Russia and Hungary and the leather of the southern steppes counteracts somewhat the far-off magnet of America's wheat and cattle. England experienced a radical change of geographic front with the sailing of the Cabots; but the enormous tonnage entering and passing from the North Sea and Channel ports for her European trade258 show the attraction of the nearby Continent. Oftentimes we find two sides of a country each playing simultaneously a different, yet an equally important historical part, and thus distributing the historical activities, while diversifying the historical development of the people. The young United States were profoundly influenced as to national ideals and their eventual territorial career by the free, eager life and the untrammeled enterprise of its wilderness frontier beyond the Alleghenies, while through the Atlantic seaboard it was kept in steadying contact with England and the inherited ideals of the race. Russia is subjected to different influences on its various fronts; it is progressive, industrial, socialistic on its European side in Poland; expansive and radical in a different way in colonial Siberia; aggressive in the south, bending its energies toward political expansion along the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf seaboards. In all such countries there is a constant shifting and readjustment of extra-territorial influences.

It is otherwise in states of very simple vicinal grouping, coupled with only a single country or at best two. Spain, from the time Hamilcar Barca made it a colony of ancient Carthage, down to the decline of its Saracen conquerors, was historically linked with Africa. Freeman calls attention to "the general law by which, in almost all periods of history, either the masters of Spain have borne rule in Africa or the masters of Africa have borne rule in Spain." The history of such simply located countries tends to have a correspondingly one-sided character. Portugal's development has been under the exclusive influence of Spain, except for the oversea stimuli brought to it by the Atlantic. England's long southern face close to the French coast had for centuries the effect of interweaving its history with that of its southern neighbor. The conspicuous fact in the foreign history of Japan has been its intimate connection with Korea above all the other states.259 Egypt, which projects as an alluvial peninsula into an ocean of desert from southwestern Asia, has seen its history, from the time of the Shepherd Kings to that of Napoleon, repeatedly linked with Palestine and Syria. Every Asiatic or European conquest of these two countries has eventually been extended to the valley of the Nile; and Egypt's one great period of expansion saw this eastern coast of the Mediterranean as far as the Euphrates united to the dominion of the Pharaohs. Here is a one-sided geographical location in an exaggerated form, emphasized by the physical and political barrenness of the adjacent regions of Africa and the strategic importance of the isthmian district between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.

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

A somewhat similar scattered location is found in arid deserts, where population is restricted to the oases dropped here and there at wide intervals amid the waste of sand. But unlike those fragments of human life on the frozen outskirts of the habitable world, the oasis states usually constitute links in a chain of connection across the desert between the fertile lands on either side, and therefore form part of a series, in which the members maintain firm and necessary economic relations. Every caravan route across the Sahara is dotted by a series of larger or smaller tribal settlements. Tripoli, Sokna, Murzuk, Bilma and Bornu form one such chain; Algiers, El Golea, Twat, the salt mines of Taudeni, Arawan and Timbuctoo, another. Bagdad, Hayil, Boreyda and Mecca trace the road of pilgrim and merchant starting from the Moslem land of the Euphrates to the shrine of Mohammed.261

Distribution Of Settlement In The Norwegian Province Of Finmarken.

Not unlike this serial grouping of oasis states along caravan routes through the desert are the island way stations that rise out of the waste of the sea and are connected by the great maritime routes of trade. Such are the Portuguese Madeiras, Bissagos, and San Thomé on the line between Lisbon and Portuguese Loanda in West Africa; and their other series of the Madeiras, Cape Verde, and Fernando, which facilitated communication with Pernambuco when Brazil was a Portuguese colony. The classic example of this serial grouping is found in the line of islands, physical or political, which trace England's artery of communication with India—Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Perim, Aden, Sokotra, and Ceylon, besides her dominant position at Suez.

Quite different from this scattered distribution, due to physical conditions, in an otherwise uninhabited waste is that wide dispersal of a people in small detached groups which is the rule in lower stages of culture, and which bespeaks the necessity of relatively large territorial reserves for the uneconomic method of land utilization characteristic of hunting, fishing, pastoral nomadism, and primitive agriculture. A distribution which claims large areas, without, however, maintaining exclusive possession or complete occupation, indicates among advanced peoples an unfinished process,262 especially unfinished expansion, such as marked the early French and English colonies in America and the recent Russian occupation of Siberia. Among primitive peoples it is the normal condition, belongs to the stage of civilization, not to any one land or any one race, though it has been called the American form of distribution.

Not only are villages and encampments widely dispersed, but also the tribal territories. The Tupis were found by the Portuguese explorers along the coast of eastern Brazil and in the interior from the mouth of the La Plata to the lower Amazon, while two distant tribes of the Tupis were dropped down amid a prevailing Arawak population far away among the foothills of the Andes in two separate localities on the western Amazon.263 [See map page 101.] The Athapascans, from their great compact northern area between Hudson Bay, the Saskatchewan River, and the Eskimo shores of the Arctic Ocean sent southward a detached offshoot comprising the Navajos, Apaches and Lipans, who were found along the Rio Grande from its source almost to its mouth; and several smaller fragments westward who were scattered along the Pacific seaboard from Puget Sound to northern California.264 The Cherokees of the southern Appalachians and the Tuscaroras of eastern North Carolina were detached groups of the Iroquois, who had their chief seat about the lower Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. Virginia and North Carolina harbored also several tribes of Sioux,265 who were also represented in southern Mississippi by the small Biloxi nation, though the chief Sioux area lay between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan rivers. Similarly the Caddoes of Louisiana and eastern Texas had one remote offshoot on the Platte River and another, the Arikaras, on the upper Missouri near its great bend. [See map page 54.] But the territory of the Caddoes, in turn, was sprinkled with Choctaws, who belonged properly east of the Mississippi, but who in 1803 were found scattered in fixed villages or wandering groups near the Bayou Teche, on the Red River, the Washita, and the Arkansas.266 Their villages were frequently interspersed with others of the Biloxi Sioux.

This fragmentary distribution appears in Africa among people in parallel stages of civilization. Dr. Junker found it as a universal phenomenon in Central Africa along the watershed between the White Nile and the Welle-Congo. Here the territory of the dominant Zandeh harbored a motley collection of shattered tribes, remnants of peoples, and intruding or refugee colonies from neighboring districts.267 The few weak bonds between people and soil characterizing retarded races are insufficient to secure permanent residence in the face of a diminished game supply, as in the case of the Choctaws above cited, or of political disturbance or oppression, or merely the desire for greater independence, as in that of so many African tribes.

Distribution Of Population In The United States In 1800.

A scattered location results in all stages of civilization when an expanding or intruding people begins to appropriate the territory of a different race. Any long continued infiltration, whether peaceful or aggressive, results in race islands or archipelagoes distributed through a sea of aborigines. Semitic immigration from southern Arabia has in this way striped and polka-dotted the surface of Hamitic Abyssinia.268 Groups of pure German stock are to-day scattered through the Baltic and Polish provinces of Russia.269 [See map page 223.] In ancient times the advance guard of Teutonic migration crossed the Rhenish border of Gaul, selected choice sites here and there, after the manner of Ariovistus, and appeared as enclaves in the encompassing Gallic population. While the Anahuac plateau of Mexico formed the center of the Aztec or Nahuatl group of Indians, outlying colonies of this stock occurred among the Maya people of the Tehuantepec region, and in Guatemala and Nicaragua.270

Such detached fragments or rather spores of settlement characterize all young geographical boundaries, where ethnic and political frontiers are still in the making. The early French, English, Dutch, and Swedish settlements in America took the form of archipelagoes in a surrounding sea of Indian-owned forest land; and in 1800, beyond the frontier of continuous settlement in the United States long slender peninsulas and remote outlying islands of white occupation indicated American advance at the cost of the native. Similarly the Portuguese, at the end of the sixteenth century, seized and fortified detached points along the coast of East Africa at Sofala, Malindi, Mombassa, Kilwa, Lamu, Zanzibar and Barava, which served as way stations for Portuguese ships bound for India, and were outposts of expansion from their Moçambique territory.271 The snow-muffled forests of northern Siberia have their solitudes broken at wide intervals by Russian villages, located only along the streams for fishing, gold-washing and trading with the native. These lonely clearings are outposts of the broad band of Muscovite settlement which stretches across southern Siberia from the Ural Mountains to the Angara River.272 [See map page 103.]

The most exaggerated example of scattered political location existing to-day is found in the bizarre arrangement of European holdings on the west coast of Africa between the Senegal and Congo rivers. Here in each case a handful of governing whites is dropped down in the midst of a dark-skinned population in several districts along the coast. The six detached seaboard colonies of the French run back in the interior into a common French-owned hinterland formed by the Sahara and western Sudan, which since 1894 link the Guinea Coast colonies with French Algeria and Tunis; but the various British holdings have no territorial cohesion at any point, nor have the Spanish or Portuguese or German. The scattered location of these different European possessions is for the most part the expression of a young colonizing activity, developed in the past fifty years, and signalized by the vigorous intrusion of the French and Germans into the field. To the anthropo-geographer the map of western Africa presents the picture of a political situation wholly immature, even embryonic. The history of similar scattered outposts of political expansion in America, India and South Africa teaches us to look for extensive consolidation.

Race islands occur also when a land is so inundated by a tide of invasion or continuous colonization that the original inhabitants survive only as detached remnants, where protecting natural conditions, such as forests, jungles, mountains or swamps, provide an asylum, or where a sterile soil or rugged plateau has failed to attract the cupidity of the conqueror. The dismembered race, especially one in a lower status of civilization, can be recognized as such islands of survival by their divided distribution in less favored localities, into which they have fled, and in which seldom can they increase and recombine to recover their lost heritage. In Central Africa, between the watersheds of the Nile, Congo and Zambesi, there is scarcely a large native state that does not shelter in its forests scattered groups of dwarf hunter folk variously known as Watwa, Batwa, and Akka.273 They serve the agricultural tribes as auxiliaries in war, and trade with them in meat and ivory, but also rob their banana groves and manioc patches. The local dispersion of these pygmies in small isolated groups among stronger peoples points to them as survivals of a once wide-spread aboriginal race, another branch of which, as Schweinfurth suggested, is probably found in the dwarfed Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa.274 [See map page 105.]

Similar in distribution and in mode of life are the aborigines of the Philippines, the dwarf Negritos, who are still found inhabiting the forests in various localities. They are dispersed through eight provinces of Luzon and in several other islands, generally in the interior, whither they have been driven by the invading Malays.275 [See map page 147.] But the Negritos crop out again in the mountain interior of Formosa and Borneo, in the eastern peninsula of Celebes, and in various islands of the Malay Archipelago as far east as Ceram and Flores, amid a prevailing Malay stock. Toward the west they come to the surface in the central highland of Malacca, in the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, and in several mountain and jungle districts of India. Here again is the typical geographic distribution of a moribund aboriginal race, whose shrivelled patches merely dot the surface of their once wide territory.276 The aboriginal Kolarian tribes of India are found under the names of Bhils, Kols and Santals scattered about in the fastnesses of the Central Indian jungles, the Vindhyan Range, and in the Rajputana Desert, within the area covered by Indo-Aryan occupation.277 [See map page 103.]

Such broad, intermittent dispersal is the anthropological prototype of the "discontinuous distribution" of biologists. By this they mean that certain types of plants and animals occur in widely separated regions, without the presence of any living representatives in the intermediate area. But they point to the rock records to show that the type once occupied the whole territory, till extensive elimination occurred, owing to changes in climatic or geologic conditions or to sharpened competition in the struggle for existence, with the result that the type survived only in detached localities offering a favorable environment.278 In animal and plant life, the ice invasion of the Glacial Age explains most of these islands of survival; in human life, the invasion of stronger peoples. The Finnish race, which in the ninth century covered nearly a third of European Russia, has been shattered by the blows of Slav expansion into numerous fragments which lie scattered about within the old ethnic boundary from the Arctic Ocean to the Don-Volga watershed.279 The encroachments of the whites upon the red men of America early resulted in their geographical dispersion. The map showing the distribution of population in 1830 reveals large detached areas of Indian occupancy embedded in the prevailing white territory.280 The rapid compression of the tribal lands and the introduction of the reservation system resulted in the present arrangement of yet smaller and more widely scattered groups. Such islands of survival tend constantly to contract and diminish in number with the growing progress, density, and land hunger of the surrounding race. The Kaffir islands and the Hottentot "locations" in South Africa, large as they now are, will repeat the history of the American Indian lands, a history of gradual shrinkage and disappearance as territorial entities.

Every land contains in close juxtaposition areas of sharply contrasted cultural, economic and political development, due to the influence of diverse natural locations emphasizing lines of ethnic cleavage made perhaps by some great historical struggle. In mountainous countries the conquered people withdraw to the less accessible heights and leave the fertile valleys to the victorious intruders. The two races are thus held apart, and the difference in their respective modes of life forced upon them by contrasted geographic conditions tends still farther for a time to accentuate their diversity. The contrasted location of the dislodged Alpine race, surviving in all the mountains and highlands of western Europe over against the Teutonic victors settled in the plains,281 has its parallel in many parts of Asia and Africa; it is almost always coupled with a corresponding contrast in mode of life, which is at least in part geographically determined. In Algeria, the Arab conquerors, who form the larger part of the population, are found in the plains where they live the life of nomads in their tents; the Berbers, who were the original inhabitants, driven back into the fastnesses of the Atlas ranges, form now an industrious, sedentary farmer class, living in stone houses, raising stock, and tilling their fields as if they were market gardeners.282 In the Andean states of South America, the eastern slopes of the Cordilleras, which are densely forested owing to their position in the course of the trade-winds, harbor wild, nomadic tribes of hunting and fishing Indians who differ in stock and culture from the Inca Indians settled in the drier Andean basins.283 [See map page 101.]

Every geographical region of strongly marked character possesses a certain polarity, by reason of which it attracts certain racial or economic elements of population, and repels others. The predatory tribes of the desert are constantly reinforced by refugee outlaws from the settled agricultural communities along its borders.284 The mountains which offer a welcome asylum for the persecuted Waldenses have no lure for the money-making Jew, who is therefore rarely found there. The negroes of the United States are more and more congregating in the Gulf States, making the "Black Belt" blacker. The fertile tidewater plains of ante-bellum Virginia and Maryland had a rich, aristocratic white population of slave-holding planters; the mountain backwoods of the Appalachian ranges, whose conditions of soil and relief were ill adapted for slave cultivation, had attracted a poorer democratic farmer class, who tilled their small holdings by their own labor and consequently entertained little sympathy for the social and economic system of the tidewater country. This is the contrast between mountain and plain which is as old as humanity. It presented problems to the legislation of Solon, and caused West Virginia to split off from the mother State during the Civil War.285

Each contrasted district has its own polarity; but with this it attracts not one but many of the disruptive forces which are pent up in every people or state. Certain conditions of climate, soil, and tillable area in the Southern States of the Union made slave labor remunerative, while opposite conditions in the North combined eventually to exclude it thence. Slave labor in the South brought with it in turn a whole train of social and economic consequences, notably the repulsion of foreign white immigration and the development of shiftless or wasteful industrial methods, which further sharpened the contrast between the two sections. The same contrast occurs in Italian territory between Sicily and Lombardy. Here location at the two extremities of the peninsula has involved a striking difference in ethnic infusions in the two districts, different historical careers owing to different vicinal grouping, and dissimilar geographic conditions. These effects operating together and attracting other minor elements of divergence, have conspired to emphasize the already strong contrast between northern and southern Italy.

In geographical location can be read the signs of growth or decay. There are racial and national areas whose form is indicative of development, expansion, while others show the symptoms of decline. The growing people seize all the geographic advantages within their reach, whether lying inside their boundaries or beyond. In the latter case, they promptly extend their frontiers to include the object of their desire, as the young United States did in the case of the Mississippi River and the Gulf coast. European peoples, like the Russians in Asia, all strive to reach the sea; and when they have got there, they proceed to embrace as big a strip of coast as possible. Therefore the whole colonization movement of western and central Europe was in the earlier periods restricted to coasts, although not to such an excessive degree as that of the Phoenicians and Greeks. Their own maritime location had instructed them as to the value of seaboards, and at the same time made this form of expansion the simplest and easiest.

On the other hand, that growing people which finds its coastward advance blocked, and is therefore restricted to landward expansion, seizes upon every natural feature that will aid its purpose. It utilizes every valley highway and navigable river, as the Russians did in the case of the Dnieper, Don, Volga, Kama and Northern Dwina in their radial expansion from the Muscovite center at Moscow, and as later they used the icy streams of Siberia in their progress toward the Pacific; or as the Americans in their trans-continental advance used the Ohio, Tennessee, the Great Lakes, and the Missouri. They reach out toward every mountain pass leading to some choice ultramontane highway. Bulges or projecting angles of their frontier indicate the path they plan to follow, and always include or aim at some natural feature which will facilitate their territorial growth. The acquisition of the province of Ticino in 1512 gave the Swiss Confederation a foothold upon Lake Maggiore, perhaps the most important waterway of northern Italy, and the possession of the Val Leventina, which now carries the St. Gotthard Railroad down to the plains of the Po. Every bulge of Russia's Asiatic frontier, whether in the Trans-Caucasus toward the Mesopotamian basin and the Persian Gulf, or up the Murghab and Tedjend rivers toward the gates of Herat, is directed at some mountain pass and an outlet seaward beyond.

If this process of growth bring a people to the borders of a desert, there they halt perhaps for a time, but only, as it were, to take breath for a stride across the sand to the nearest oasis. The ancient Egyptians advanced by a chain of oases—Siwa, Angila, Sella and Sokna, across the Libyan Desert to the Syrtis Minor. The Russians in the last twenty-five years have spread across the arid wastes of Turkestan by way of the fertile spots of Khiva, Bukhara and Merv to the irrigated slopes of the Hindu Kush and Tian Shan Mountains. The French extended the boundaries of Algiers southward into the desert to include the caravan routes focusing at the great oases of Twat and Tidekelt, years before their recent appropriation of the western Sahara.

As territorial expansion is the mark of growth, so the sign of decline is the relinquishment of land that is valuable or necessary to a people's well-being. The gradual retreat of the Tartars and in part also of the Kirghis tribes from their best pasture lands along the Volga into the desert or steppes indicates their decrease of power, just as the withdrawal of the Indians from their hunting grounds in forest and prairie was the beginning of their decay. Bolivia maimed herself for all time when in 1884 she relinquished to Chile her one hundred and eighty miles of coast between the Rio Lao and the twenty-fourth parallel. Her repeated efforts later to recover at least one seaport on the Pacific indicate her own estimate of the loss by which she was limited to an inland location, and deprived of her maritime periphery.286

The habits of a people and the consequent demands which they make upon their environment must be taken into account in judging whether or not a restricted geographical location is indicative of a retrograde process. The narrow marginal distribution of the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshean Indians on the islands and coastal strips of northwestern America means simply the selection of sites most congenial to those inveterate fisher tribes. The fact that the English in the vicinity of the Newfoundland Banks settled on a narrow rim of coast in order to exploit the fisheries, while the French peasants penetrated into the interior forests and farmlands of Canada, was no sign of territorial decline. English and French were both on the forward march, each in their own way. The scattered peripheral location of the Phoenician trading stations and later of the Greek colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean was the expression of the trading and maritime activity of those two peoples. Centuries later a similar distribution of Arab posts along the coast of East Africa, Madagascar and the western islands of the Sunda Archipelago indicated the great commercial expansion of the Mohammedan traders of Oman and Yemen. The lack came when this distribution, normal as a preliminary form, bore no fruit in the occupation of wide territorial bases. [See map page 251.]

In general, however, any piecemeal or marginal location of a people justifies the question as to whether it results from encroachment, dismemberment, and consequently national or racial decline. This inference as a rule strikes the truth. The abundance of such ethnic islands and reefs—some scarcely distinguishable above the flood of the surrounding population—is due to the fact that when the area of distribution of any life form, whether racial or merely animal, is for any cause reduced, it does not merely contract but breaks up into detached fragments. These isolated groups often give the impression of being emigrants from the original home who, in some earlier period of expansion, had occupied this outlying territory. At the dawn of western European history, Gaul was the largest and most compact area of Celtic speech. For this reason it has been regarded as the land whence sprang the Celts of Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, the Alps and northern Italy. Freeman thinks that the Gauls of the Danube and Po valleys were detachments which had been left behind in the great Celtic migration toward the west;287 but does not consider the possibility of a once far more extensive Celtic area, which, as a matter of fact, once reached eastward to the Weser River and the Sudetes Mountains and was later dismembered.288 The islands of Celtic speech which now mark the western flank of Great Britain and Ireland are shrunken fragments of a Celtic linguistic area which, as place-names indicate, once comprised the whole country.289 Similarly, all over Russia Finnic place-names testify to the former occupation of the country by a people now submerged by the immigrant Slavs, except where they emerge in ethnic islands in the far north and about the elbow of the Volga.290 [See map page 225.] Beyond the compact area of the Melanesian race occupying New Guinea and the islands eastward to the Fiji and Loyalty groups, are found scattered patches of negroid folk far to the westward, relegated to the interiors of islands and peninsulas. The dispersed and fragmentary distribution of this negroid stock has suggested that it formed the older and primitive race of a wide region extending from India to Fiji and possibly even beyond.291

Ethnic or political islands of decline can be distinguished from islands of expansion by various marks. When survivals of an inferior people, they are generally characterized by inaccessible or unfavorable geographic location. When remnants of former large colonial possessions of modern civilized nations, they are characterized by good or even excellent location, but lack a big compact territory nearby to which they stand in the relation of outpost. Such are the Portuguese fragments on the west coast of India at Goa, Damaon, and Diu Island, and the Portuguese half of the island of Timor with the islet of Kambing in the East Indies. Such also are the remnants of the French empire in India, founded by the genius of François Dupleix, which are located on the seaboard at Chandarnagar, Carical, Pondicherry, Yanaon and Mahe. They tell the geographer a far different story from that of the small detached French holding of Kwang-chan Bay and Nao-chan Island on the southern coast of China, which are outposts of the vigorous French colony of Tongking.

The scattered islands of an intrusive people, bent upon conquest or colonization, are distinguished by a choice of sites favorable to growth and consolidation, and by the rapid extension of their boundaries until that consolidation is achieved; while the people themselves give signs of the rapid differentiation incident to adaptation to a new environment.

NOTES TO CHAPTER V