Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
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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
126.
H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 179-187. London, 1904. W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 306-310, 319-326. New York, 1899.
127.Compare observations of Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. I, pp. 312-313. London, 1873.
128.Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. lvii. Philadelphia, 1868.
129.D.M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 151-155. New York, 1904.
130.Thucydides, Book I, chap. II.
131.Strabo, Book II, chap. III, 7.
132.McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 408-414, Vol. XIX of History of North America, edited by T.N. Thorpe. Philadelphia, 1905.
133.Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 214. Oxford, 1892.
134.Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, p. 587. New York, 1872.
135.D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 116-119. Philadelphia, 1901.
136.O.T. Mason, Primitive Travel and Transportation, pp. 249-250. Smithsonian Report, Washington, 1896.
137.Thucydides, Book I, chap. II.
138.Edward A. Boss, Foundations of Sociology, pp. 359-363, 386-389. New York, 1905.
139.D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 73-75. Philadelphia, 1901.
140.John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 9-11, 45-46, 52-54, 57, 62. London, 1904.
141.James Bryce, The Migration of the Races of Men Considered Historically, Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421, and Smithsonian Report for 1893, pp. 567-588.
142.Cæsar, De Bello Gallico, Book II, chap. 29.
143.Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, Vol. I, p. 5. New York, 1883.
144.John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, p. 46. London, 1904.
145.Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. V, pp. 99-101. Oxford, 1895.
146.Ibid., Vol. V, pp. 156-157.
147.Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, pp. 107, 195. Oxford, 1892.
148.Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 219-223, 230.
149.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 276-277. New York, 1899.
150.Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, pp. 214-219. Oxford, 1892.
151.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 296. London, 1896-1898.
152.McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 408-412, Vol. XIX of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1905.
153.Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, p. 858. New York, 1902.
154.Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, pp. 44-48. Stuttgart, 1888.
155.Cyrus Thomas, The Indians of North America in Historical Times, p. 261. Vol. II of History of North America, Philadelphia, 1903.
156.Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 134-135, 250. New York, 1895. Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 16. Boston, 1899.
157.Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, p. 54. Washington, 1894.
158.Ibid., p. 531.
159.Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, p. 411. New York, 1902-1906.
160.Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. II, pp. 57-58. Oxford, 1899.
161.II Kings, Chap. XVII, 6-24.
162.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 432-434. New York, 1899.
163.Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. V, pp. 353-354. New York, 1902-1906.
164.Ibid., Vol. VI, p. 15.
165.D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 247. London, 1902.
166.Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. I, p. 248. New York, 1895.
167.C.C. Royce, The Cherokee Nation of Indians, pp. 130-131. Maps VIII and IX. Fifth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1887.
168.Albert Gallatin, Report on the Indians in 1836, reprinted in Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, p. 33. Washington, 1894.
169.Cyrus Thomas, Indians of North America in Historical Times, pp. 94, 96. Vol. II of History of North America, Philadelphia, 1903.
170.Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 100-101.
171.Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. III, pp. 333-334. New York, 1902.
172.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 437-438. New York, 1899.
173.D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 115-116. Philadelphia, 1901.
174.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. III, pp. 559, 635-638. San Francisco, 1886.
175.Cyrus Thomas, Indians of North America in Historical Times, pp. 381-382, Vol. II of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1903.
176.Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, p. 35. Washington, 1894.
177.Eleventh Census, Report on Population, Vol. I, p. cxxxviii. Washington, 1894.
178.Justus Perthes, Taschen Atlas, p. 38. Gotha, 1905.
179.Richmond Mayo-Smith, Emigration and Immigration, p. 24. New York.
180.Ibid., pp. 79-80, 113-115.
181.Capt. A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 27-28. Boston, 1902.
182.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 247, 272-274. New York, 1899.
183.Cæsar, Bella Gallico, Book III, chap. I.
184.Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 34-43. Oxford, 1892.
185.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 242, 245, 250, 257. London, 1896-1898.
186.John Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, pp. 316-317. Boston, 1893.
187.Elliott Coues, History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Vol. I. pp. 193-198, 203-212, 240. New York, 1893.
188.Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, pp. 39-40,
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