Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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When the political boundary has evolved by a system of contraction out of the wide waste zone to the nicely determined line, that line, nevertheless, is always encased, as it were, in a zone of contact wherein are mingled the elements of either side. The zone includes the peripheries of the two contiguous racial or national bodies, and in it each is modified and assimilated to the other. On its edges it is strongly marked by the characteristics of the adjacent sides, but its medial band shows a mingling of the two in ever-varying proportions; it changes from day to day and shifts backward and forward, according as one side or the other exercises in it more potent economic, religious, racial, or political influences.
Its peripheral character comes out strongly in the mingling of contiguous ethnic elements found in every frontier district. Here is that zone of transitional form which we have seen prevails so widely in nature. The northern borderland of the United States is in no small degree Canadian, and the southern is strongly Mexican. In the Rio Grande counties of Texas, Mexicans constituted in 1890 from 27 to 55 per cent. of the total population, and they were distributed in considerable numbers also in the second tier of counties. A broad band of French and English Canadians overlaps the northern hem of United States territory from Maine to North Dakota.366 In the New York and New England counties bordering on the old French province of Quebec, they constitute from 11 to 22 per cent. of the total population, except in two or three western counties of Maine which have evidently been mere passways for a tide of habitants moving on to more attractive conditions of life in the counties just to the south.367 But even these large figures do not adequately represent the British-American element within our boundaries, because they leave out of account the native-born of Canadian parents who have been crossing our borders for over a generation.
If we turn to northern Italy, where a mountain barrier might have been expected to segregate the long-headed Mediterranean stock from the broad-headed Alpine stock, we find as a matter of fact that the ethnic type throughout the Po basin is markedly brachycephalic and becomes more pronounced along the northern boundary in the Alps, till it culminates in Piedmont along the frontier of France, where it becomes identical with the broad-headed Savoyards.368 More than this, Provençal French is spoken in the Dora Baltea Valley of Piedmont; and along the upper Dora Riparia and in the neighboring valleys of the Chisone and Pellice are the villages of the refugee Waldenses, who speak an idiom allied to the Provençal. More than this, the whole Piedmontese Italian is characterized by its approach to the French, and the idiom of Turin sounds very much like Provençal.369 To the north there is a similar exchange between Italy and Switzerland with the adjacent Austrian province of the Tyrol. In the rugged highlands of the Swiss Grisons bordering upon Italy, we find a pure Alpine stock, known to the ancients as the Rhaetians, speaking a degenerate Latin tongue called Romansch, which still persists also under the names of Ladino and Frioulian in the Alpine regions of the Tyrol and Italy. In fact, the map of linguistic boundaries in the Grisons shows the dovetailing of German, Italian, and Romansch in a broad zone.370 The traveller in the southern Tyrol becomes accustomed in the natives to the combination of Italian coloring, German speech, and Alpine head form; whereas, if on reaching Italy he visits the hills back of Vicenza, he finds the German settlements of Tredici and Sette Communi, where German customs, folklore, language, and German types of faces still persist, survivals from the days of German infiltration across the Brenner Pass.371
Slav-German Boundary In Europe.
Slav-German Boundary In Europe.
Where Slavs and Teutons come together in Central Europe, their race border is a zone lying approximately between 14 and 24 degrees East Longitude; it is crossed by alternate peninsulas of predominant Germans and Austrians from the one side, Czechs and Poles from the other, the whole spattered over by a sprinkling of the two elements. Rarely, and then only for short stretches, do political and ethnic boundaries coincide. The northern frontier hem of East Prussia lying between the River Niemen and the political line of demarcation is quite as much Lithuanian as German, while German stock dots the whole surface of the Baltic provinces of Russia as far as St. Petersburg, The eastern rim of the Kaiser's empire as far south as the Carpathians presents a broad band of the Polish race, averaging about fifty kilometers (30 miles) in width, sparsely sprinkled with German settlements; these are found farther east also as an ethnic archipelago dotting the wide Slav area of Poland. The enclosed basin of Bohemia, protected on three sides by mountain walls and readily accessible to the Slav stock at the sources of the Vistula, enabled the Czechs to penetrate far westward and there maintain themselves; but in spite of encompassing mountains, the inner or Bohemian slopes of the Boehmer Wald, Erz, and Sudetes ranges constitute a broad girdle of almost solid German population.372 In the Austrian provinces of Moravia and Silesia, which form the southeastward continuation of this Slav-German boundary zone, 60 per cent. of the population are Czechs, 33 per cent. are German, and 7 per cent., found in the eastern part of Silesia, are Poles.373
An ethnic map of the western Muscovite Empire in Europe shows a marked infiltration into White and Little Russia of West Slavs from Poland, and in the province of Bessarabia alternate areas of Russians and Roumanians. The latter in places form an unbroken ethnic expansion from the home kingdom west of the Pruth, extending in solid bands as far as the Dniester, and throwing out ethnic islands between this stream and the Bug.
Ethnographical Map Of Russia. MONGOLOID: Kalmucks, Kirghis, Nogai, Tartars, Bashkirs, Voguls, Ostiaks, Samoyedes. ZIRIAN: Mingled Mongoloid and Finnish.
Ethnographical Map Of Russia.
MONGOLOID: Kalmucks, Kirghis, Nogai, Tartars, Bashkirs, Voguls, Ostiaks.
Samoyedes.
ZIRIAN: Mingled Mongoloid and Finnish.
In the northern provinces of Russia, in the broad zone shared by the aboriginal Finns and the later-coming Slavs, Wallace found villages in every stage of Russification. "In one everything seemed thoroughly Finnish; the inhabitants had a reddish-olive skin, very high cheek bones, obliquely set eyes, and a peculiar costume; none of the women and very few of the men could understand Russian and any Russian who visited the place was regarded as a foreigner. In the second, there were already some Russian inhabitants; the others had lost something of their purely Finnish type, many of the men had discarded the old costume and spoke Russian fluently, and a Russian visitor was no longer shunned. In a third, the Finnish type was still further weakened; all the men spoke Russian, and nearly all the women understood it; the old male costume had entirely disappeared and the old female was rapidly following it; and intermarriage with the Russian population was no longer rare. In a fourth, intermarriage had almost completely done its work, and the old Finnish element could be detected merely in certain peculiarities of physiognomy and accent." This amalgamation extends to their religions—prayers wholly pagan devoutly uttered under the shadow of a strange cross, next the Finnish god Yumak sharing honors equally with the Virgin, finally a Christianity pure in doctrine and outward forms except for the survival of old pagan ceremonies in connection with the dead.374
At the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, this boundary zone of Russians and Finns meets the borderland of the Asiatic Mongols; and here is found an intermingling of races, languages, religions, and customs scarcely to be equalled elsewhere. Finns are infused with Tartar as well as Russian blood, and Russians show Tartar as well as Finnish traits. The Bashkirs, who constitute an ethnic peninsula running from the solid Mongolian mass of Asia, show every type of the mongrel.375 [See map page 225.]
If we turn to Asia and examine the western race boundary of the expanding Chinese, we find that a wide belt of mingled ethnic elements, hybrid languages, and antagonistic civilizations marks the transition from Chinese to Mongolian and Tibetan areas. The eastern and southern frontiers of Mongolia, formerly marked by the Great Wall, are now difficult to define, owing to the steady encroachment of the agricultural Chinese on the fertile edges of the plateau, where they have converted the best-watered pastures of the Mongols into millet fields and vegetable gardens, leaving for the nomad's herds the more sterile patches between.376 Every line of least resistance—climatic, industrial, commercial—sees the Chinese widening this transitional zone. He sprinkles his crops over the "Land of Grass," invades the trade of the caravan towns, sets up his fishing station on the great northern bend of the Hoangho in the Ordos country, three hundred miles beyond the Wall, to exploit the fishing neglected by the Mongols.377 The well-watered regions of the Nan-Shan ranges has enabled him to drive a long, narrow ethnic wedge, represented by the westward projection of Kansu Province between Mongolia and Tibet, into the heart of the Central Plateau. [See map page 103.] Here the nomad Si Fan tribes dwell side by side with Chinese farmers,378 who themselves show a strong infusion of the Mongolian and Tibetan blood to the north and south, and whose language is a medley of all three tongues.379
In easternmost Tibet, in the elevated province of Minjak (2,600 meters or 8,500 feet), M. Hue found in 1846 a great number of Chinese from the neighboring Sze-Chuan and Yun-nan districts keeping shops and following the primary trades and agriculture. The language of the Tibetan natives showed the effect of foreign intercourse; it was not the pure speech of Lhassa, but was closely assimilated to the idiom of the neighboring Si Fan speech of Sze-Chuan and contained many Chinese expressions. He found also a modification of manners, customs, and costumes in this peripheral Tibet; the natives showed more of the polish, cunning, and covetousness of the Chinese, less of the rudeness, frankness, and strong religious feeling characteristic of the western plateau man.380 Just across the political boundary in Chinese territory, the border zone of assimilation shows predominance of the Chinese element with a strong Tibetan admixture both in race and civilization.381 Here Tibetan traders with their yak caravans are met on the roads or encamped in their tents by the hundred about the frontier towns, whither they have brought the wool, sheep, horses, hides and medicinal roots of the rough highland across that "wild borderland which is neither Chinese nor Tibetan." The Chinese population consists of hardy mountaineers, who eat millet and maize instead of rice. The prevailing architecture is Tibetan and the priests on the highways are the red and yellow lamas from the Buddhist monasteries of the plateau. "The Country is a cross between China and Tibet."382
Even the high wall of the Himalayas does not suffice to prevent similar exchanges of ethnic elements and culture
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