Read Ebook: Influences of Geographic Environment On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography by Semple Ellen Churchill

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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. 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 mediaeval 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 pre?minence 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.

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. 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.

George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 149-157. New York, 1897.

Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, p. 372. London and New York, 1902-1906.

Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, 1641-1667. Vol. I, chap. V and map. London, 1889.

Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 305. London, 1905.

Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 464-465, 469. London, 1883.

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

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

H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 317-323. London, 1904.

Captain A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 36-38. Boston, 1902.

Captain A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 37-38. Boston, 1902.

Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 123, 124, 145-147. Philadelphia, 1891.

Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. I, pp. 86-106.

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

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

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

Plutarch, Solon, pp. 13, 29, 154.

Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 244-245. New York, 1902-1906.

Captain A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 41-42, 50-53. Boston, 1902.

H. Bancroft, History of California, Vol. I, pp. 298, 628-635. San Francisco.

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

Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 351, 470-471. London, 1883.

CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES

Into almost every anthropo-geographical problem the element of environment enters in different phases, with different modes of operation and varying degrees of importance. Since the causal conception of geography demands a detailed analysis of all the relations between environment and human development, it is advisable to distinguish the various classes of geographic influences.

Four fundamental classes of effects can be distinguished.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Livingstone found these same characteristics of broad chests and shoulders with ill-developed legs among the Barotse of the upper Zambesi; 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. An identical environment has produced a like physical effect upon the canoemen of Tierra del Fuego and the Aleutian Islanders, who often sit in their boats twenty hours at a time. 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." 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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, 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, and a like effect has been observed among albino Polynesians, and Melanesians of Fiji. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. Waitz long ago affirmed this tendency of mountaineers to lighter coloring from his study of primitive peoples. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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