Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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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
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