Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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Small, naturally defined areas, whether their boundaries are drawn by mountains, sea, or by both, always harbor small but markedly individual peoples, as also peculiar or endemic animal forms, whose differentiation varies with the degree of isolation. Such peoples can be found over and over again in islands, peninsulas, confined mountain valleys, or desert-rimmed oases. The cause lies in the barriers to expansion and to accessions of population from without which confront such peoples on every side. Broad, uniform continental areas, on the other hand, where nature has erected no such obstacles are the habitats of wide-spread peoples, monotonous in type. The long stretch of coastal lowlands encircling the Arctic Ocean and running back into the wide plains of North America and Eurasia show a remarkable uniformity of animal and plant forms298 and a striking similarity of race through the Lapps, the Samoyedes of northern Russia, the various Mongolian tribes of Arctic Siberia to Bering Strait, and the Eskimo, that curiously transitional race, formerly classified as Mongolian and more recently as a divergent Indian stock; for the Eskimos are similar to the Siberians in stature, features, coloring, mode of life, in everything but head-form, though even the cephalic indices approach on the opposite shores of Bering Sea.299 Where geography draws no dividing line, ethnology finds it difficult to do so. Where the continental land-masses converge is found similarity or even identity of race, easy gradations from one type to another; where they diverge most widely in the peninsular extremities of South America, South Africa and Australia, they show the greatest dissimilarity in their native races, and a corresponding diversity in their animal life.300 Geographical proximity combined with accessibility results in similarity of human and animal occupants, while a corresponding dissimilarity is the attendant of remoteness or of segregation. Therefore, despite the distribution of mankind over the total habitable area of the earth, his penetration into its detached regions and hidden corners has maintained such variations as still exist in the human family.
If the distribution of the several races be examined in the light of this conclusion, it becomes apparent that the races who have succeeded in appropriating only limited portions of the earth's surface, though each may be a marked variant of the human family, are characterized by few inner diversities, either of physical features or culture. Their subdivisions feel only in a slight degree the differentiating effects of geographic remoteness, which in a small area operates with weakened force; and they enjoy few of those diversities of environment which stimulate variation. They form close and distinct ethnic unities also because their scant numbers restrict the appearance of variations. The habitat of the negro race in Africa south of the Sahara, relatively small, limited in its zonal location almost wholly to the Tropics, poorly diversified both in relief and contour, has produced only a retarded and monotonous social development based upon tropical agriculture or a low type of pastoral life. The still smaller, still less varied habitat of the Australian race, again tropical or sub-tropical in location, has produced over its whole extent only one grade of civilization and that the lowest, one physical, mental and moral type.301
The Mongoloid area of distribution, on the other hand, is so large that it necessarily includes a great range of climates and variety of geographic conditions. [Maps pages 103 and 225.] Representatives of this race, reflecting their diversified habitats, show many ethnic differentiations. They reveal also every stage and phase of cultural development from the industrialism of Japan, with its artistic and literary concomitants, to the savage economy and retarded intellectual life of the Chukches fisher tribes or the Giljak hunters of Sakhalin. The white race, identified primarily with Europe, that choice and diversified continent, comprised also a large area of southwestern Asia and the northern third of Africa. It thus extended from the Arctic Circle well within the Tropics. Its area included every variety of geographic condition and originally every degree of cultural development; but the rapid expansion in recent centuries of the most advanced peoples of this race has made them the apostles of civilization to the whole world. It has also given them, through the occupation of Australia and the Americas, the widest distribution and the most varied habitats. As agents of the modern historical movement, however, they are subjected to all its assimilating effects, which tend to counteract the diversities born of geographic segregation, and to raise all branches of the white race to one superior cosmopolitan type. On the other hand, the vast international division of labor and specialization of production, geographically based and entailed by advancing economic development, besides the differences of traditions and ideals reaching far back into an historic past and rooted in the land, will serve to maintain many subtle inner differences between even the most progressive nations.
Hence the wide area which Darwin found to be most favorable to improved variation and rapid evolution in animals, operates to the same end in human development, and its influence becomes a law of anthropo-geography. It permeates the higher aspects of life. The wide, varied area occupied by the Germanic tribes of Europe permitted the evolution of the many dialects which finally made the richness of modern German speech. English has gained in vocabulary and idiom with every expansion of its area. New territories mean to a people new pursuits, new relations, new wants; and all these become reflected in their speech. Languages, like peoples, cease to grow with national stagnation.302 To such stagnation movement or expansion is the surest antidote. America will in time make its contribution to the English tongue. The rich crop of slang that springs up on the frontier is not wholly to be deplored. The crudeness and vigor of cowboy speech are marks of youth: they are also promises of growth. Language can not live by dictionary alone. It tends to form new variants with every change of habitat. The French of the Canadian habitant has absorbed Indian and English words, and adapted old terms to new uses;303 but it is otherwise a survival of seventeenth century French. Boer speech in South Africa shows the same thing—absorption of new Kaffir and English words, coupled with marks of retardation due to isolation. Religion in the same way gains by wide dispersal. Christianity is one thing in St. Petersburg, another among the Copts of Cairo, another in Rome, another in London, and yet another in Boston. Buddhism takes on a different color in Ceylon, Tibet, China and Japan. In religion as in other phases of human development, differentiation must mean eventual enrichment, a larger content of the religious idea, to which each faith makes its contribution.
The larger the area occupied by a race or people, other geographic conditions being equal, the surer the guarantee of their permanence, and the less the chance of their repression or annihilation. A broad geographic base means generally abundant command of the resources of life and growth. Though for a growing people of wide possessions, like the Russians, the significance of the land may not be obvious, it becomes apparent enough in national decline and decay; for these even in their incipiency betray themselves in a loss of territory. A people which, voluntarily or otherwise, renounces its hold upon its land is on the downward path. Nothing else could show so plainly the national vitality of Japan as her tenacious purpose to get back Port Arthur taken from her by the Shimonoseki treaty in 1895. A people may decrease in numbers without serious consequences if it still retains its land; for herein lies its resources by which it may again hope to grow. The recurring loss of millions of lives in China from the wide-sweeping floods of the Hoangho is a passing episode, forgotten as soon as the mighty stream is re-embanked and the flooded plains reclaimed. The Civil War in the United States involved a temporary diminution of population and check to progress, but no lasting national weakness because no loss of territory. But the expulsion of the American Indians from their well-stocked hunting grounds in the Mississippi Valley and Atlantic plain to more restricted and barren lands in the far West, and the withdrawal of the Australian natives from the fertile coasts to the desert interior have meant racial renunciation of the sources of life.
Hence a people who are conquered and dislodged from their territory, as were the ancient Britons by the Saxons, the Slavs from the land between the Elbe and the Niemen by the mediæval Germans, and the Kaffirs in South Africa by the Dutch and English, the Ainos from Hondo by the Japanese, and the whole original Alpine race by the later coming Teutons from the fertile valleys and plains into the more barren highlands of western Europe, have little or no chance of regaining their own. When conquest results not in dislodgement, but only in the subjection of an undisturbed native population to a new ruling class, the vanquished retain their hold, only slightly impaired, perhaps, upon their strength-giving fields, recover themselves, and sooner or later conquer their conquerors either by absorption or revolution. This was the history of ancient Egypt with its Shepherd Kings, of England with its Norman lords, of Mexico and Peru with their Spanish victors.
A large area throws around all the life forms which it supports the protection of its mere distances, which facilitate defense in competition with other forms, render attack difficult, and afford room for retreat under pursuit. On the other hand, the small area is easily compassed by the invaders, and its inhabitants soon brought to bay. Since there is a general correspondence between size of area and number of inhabitants, where physical conditions and economic development are similar, a small area involves a further handicap of numerical weakness of population. Greece has always suffered from the small size of the peninsula and the further political dismemberment entailed by its geographic subdivisions. Despite superior civilization and national heroism, it has fallen a victim to almost every invader. Belgium, Holland, Switzerland exist as distinct nations only on sufferance. Finland's history since 1900 shows that the day for the national existence of small peoples is passing.304 The fragmentary political geography of the Danube basin gives the geographer the impression of an artist's crayon studies of details, destined later to be incorporated in a finished picture. Their small areas promise short-lived autonomy. The recent absorption of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria indicates the destiny of these Danubian states as fixed by the law of increasing territorial aggregates.
What is true of states is true also of peoples. The extinction of the retarded "provisional peoples" of the earth progresses more rapidly in small groups than in large, and in small islands more quickly than in continental areas. Of the twenty-one Indian stocks or families which have died out in the United States, fifteen belonged to the small bands once found in the Pacific coast states, and four more were similar fragments found on the lower Mississippi and its bayous.305 [See map page 54.] The native Gaunches of Teneriffe Island disappeared long ago. The last Tasmanian died in 1876. New Zealand, whose area
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