[Sidenote: Motive of protection in primitive peoples.]

Instances of this sort, rare in modern times, because of of general economic and social progress, multiply when we go into the history of primitive or ancient peoples. The Cherokee Indians of the Southern Appalachians, surrounded by powerful neighbors in the Chickasaws, Creeks and the encroaching whites of the seaboard colonies, attacked by war parties of Shawnees and Iroquois from the north, located the bulk of their nation in the mountains. The Overhill and Middle towns, numbering together thirty-three and situated wholly in the mountains, comprised four-fifths of their fighting force in 1775, while the nine towns distributed in the flat lands of Georgia and South Carolina were small and unimportant. The Indians themselves distinguished these two divisions of their country, the one as Otarre or mountainous, and the others as Ayrate or low.[1259] Similarly in ancient Gaul the three strongest tribes, the Sequani, Aedui, and Arverni, all had a large mountain nucleus. The Sequani held the Jura range with part of the Saone Valley; the Aedui held the northeast corner of the Central Plateau and some lands on the Saone, while the Arverni inhabited the western and central portion of the same highland. In a period of constant tribal migrations and war, the occupants of these high, protected locations were better able to defend themselves, and they maintained an adequate food supply by holding some of the adjoining lowland. Archaeologists generally agree that in central and southern Italy settlement first took place in the mountains, gradually extending thence down into the plains. The superiority of the upland climate, the more abundant rainfall, the greater security against attack offered by mountain sites, and the excellent soil for agriculture resulting from the geological make-up of the Apennines, all combined to draw thither primitive and later settlement.[1260] [See map page 559.] Similarly in Britain of the Bronze Age, before the peoples of Aryan speech began to swarm over the island, the primitive inhabitants, involved in constant clan or tribal warfare, placed their villages on the hills, and left in the indestructible terraces on their slopes the evidences of a vanished race and an outgrown social order.[1261]

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions affecting density of mountain population.]

The advance of civilization, which brought the ancient pirate-ridden city from the inner edge of the coastal zone down to the wave-washed strand, also drew the hill town down to the plain, and the mountain population from their inaccessible strongholds to the more accessible and productive valleys. These facts contain a hint. The future investigation of archaeological remains in high mountain districts may reveal at considerable elevations the oldest and hence lowest strata of prehistoric development, strata which, in the more attractive valleys, have been obliterated or overlaid by later invasions of peoples and cultures. Ignoring this temporary attraction of population to protected mountain locations in ages of persistent warfare, we find that a comparison of many countries reveals a decreasing food supply and decreasing density of population, with every increase of height above a certain altitude, except in favored mining regions and in some tropical lands, where better climatic conditions and freedom from malaria distribute settlements far above the steaming and forest-choked lowlands. The density of population in mountains is influenced also by the composition of the soil, which affects its fertility; by the grade and exposure of the slopes, which determine the ease and success of tillage; by the proximity of the highlands to teeming centers of lowland population, and by the general economic development of the people.

In Great Britain, the sparsest population is found in the sterile highland moors of Scotland, where the county of Sutherland has only 11 inhabitants to the square mile, Inverness only 20.[1262] These figures reveal also the remoteness of a far northern location. In the southern half of the island the sparsest populations are found in the Welsh county of Radnor, with 49 to the square mile, and in English Westmoreland with 85, both of them mountain regions, but reflecting in their larger figures their close proximity to the teeming industrial centers of South Wales and Lancashire respectively. In France the most thinly settled departements are Basses-Alpes with 43 to the square mile and Hautes-Alpes with 50, which again owe even these figures in part to their situation on the margin of the densely populated valley of the middle Rhone. [See map page 559.] Norway, almost wholly a mountain country, averages only 18 souls to the square mile. Less than a thousand square miles of its territory are under cultivation, and these are distributed in small deltas at the heads of the fiords, in low strips here and there along its western coasts, or in the openings of its mountain valleys to the southeast. Here too is massed the larger part of its inhabitants. A barren granitic soil, unfavorable zonal location, excessive rainfall, paucity of level land, leaving the "upright farm" predominant, and remoteness from any thickly settled areas, together with the resulting enormous emigration, have combined to keep down Norway's population.

[Sidenote: Sparsity of population in the Alps.]

If we turn to Switzerland, a country poor in the resources of its land but rich in the resourcefulness of its people, we find a high average density, 218 to the square mile; but this is due to the surprising industrial development of the marginal plains, which show in the Canton of Geneva 1356 to the square mile, and in Canton Zurich 705, while the rugged upland of Graubuenden (Grisons) shows only 38 to the square mile, Uri only 48, and Wallis (Valais) only 59. How limited is the food supply of the country is evident from the fact that only 2400 square miles, or fifteen per cent. of its area, can be ranked as arable land, fit for garden, orchard or grain field, while a larger proportion, or twenty-eight per cent. is made wholly useless by watercourses, glaciers, rock and detritus. One half of the entire country lies above the region where agriculture is possible. In the Cantons of Uri and Valais, more than half the area is absolutely unproductive, scarcely less in the Grisons, and a third even in sunny Ticino.[1263] The three strictly Alpine provinces of Austria, Tyrol, Salzburg and Carinthia, reproduce approximately these geographic conditions. Nearly half of their area is uninhabited, and only one-seventh consists of arable land. In consequence they support only 75 inhabitants to the square mile, while just outside the mountains, in the piedmont or Alpine foreland, this density is doubled.[1264] Many tracts of the Carpathians, especially about the sources of the Theiss and Pruth and the wooded mountain borders of Transylvania, are among the most sparsely inhabited parts of Europe.[1265] Japan, ridged by steep volcanic ranges, drenched by mountain-born rains, strewn with detritus from plunging torrents, can cultivate only 15.7 per cent. of its area, and is forced to leave 59 per cent. in forest reserves.[1266]

[Sidenote: Terrace agriculture.]

These figures tell of the hard conditions of life characteristic of most mountain regions. Population under normal circumstances settles in the narrow valleys between the ranges and along the borders of their drainage stream. Soon, however, the food supply becomes inadequate for the growing numbers, so that artificial means have to be employed to expand the area of arable land. The soil on the mountain slopes is so thin that it yields only a scanty return to the labor of tillage. Moreover, under the operations of ploughing and harrowing, it is exposed to the danger of washing; so that after a few croppings the underlying rock of the mountain side may be laid bare, and all that was valuable in the quondam field deposited in the valley as silt or swept away to enrich the distant delta of the nearest trunk river.

To obviate this difficulty and to secure the desired increase of arable land, mountain peoples the world over have resorted to terrace agriculture. This means hand-made fields. Parallel walls, one above the other, are constructed on horizontal lines across the face of the steep slopes, and the intervals between are filled with earth, carried thither in baskets on the peasants' backs. The soil must be constantly renewed and enriched by manure in the same way, and the masonry of the retaining walls kept in repair. Whenever possible these costly terraced fields are located by preference on southward facing slopes, where the tilt of the land makes the fields catch the rays of the sun almost at right angles and thus counteracts the chill of the higher altitude, while the mountain behind protects the growing crops from cold northern winds. Good arable land, being limited in amount, commands a high price; and especially do choice terraced fields in vine-growing countries, since they make the best vineyards. Such fields in Switzerland will bring from $300 to $2,000 an acre, and are estimated to produce annually two bottles of wine for every square foot.[1267]

[Sidenote: Geographical distribution.]

Terrace agriculture, rare in new countries, in the more densely populated Old World is widely distributed in mountainous areas. In Germany, where it is nearly identical with the culture of the vine, it is found along the steep slopes overlooking the valley of the Moselle and the Rhine; also in the Vosges Mountains, the Black Forest and the Swabian Jura, to the limited altitude in which the vine will flourish in these northern regions. In the Alps it is widespread, and not confined to the culture of the vine. The traveler passing along the upper Rhone through the sunny Canton of Valais follows these terraced fields almost as far as Fiesch (altitude 3458 feet), beyond which agriculture proper becomes more and more restricted on account of the elevation, and passes rapidly into the mere hay-making of a pastoral community. Between Leak and Sierre, not only the mountain sides, but also the steep gravel hills constituting the old terminal moraine deposited by the receding Rhone glacier across the valley floor, are terraced to their very tops.

Terrace cultivation prevails in the mountains of Italy; it is utilized not only for the vine, but for olives, maize, oats, hemp, rye and flax. On the gentler declivities of the Apennines, the terraced walls are wider apart and lower than on the steep slopes of the Ligurian Apennines and along the Riviera of the Maritime Alps, where the mountains rise abruptly from the margin of the sea.[1268] Careful and laborious terrace cultivation has produced in Italy a class of superior gardeners. The Genoese are famous for their skill in this sort of culture. The men from the Apennine plateau of the Abruzzi readily find positions in the lowlands as expert gardeners.[1269]

[Sidenote: Terrace culture of the Saracens.]

The Saracens of Spain in the tenth century converted every mountain slope into a succession of green terraces. They built walls of heavy masonry, and brought water, loam, and fertilizing materials from great distances. The slopes of Granada back of Malaga and Almeria were covered with vineyards. Every foot of land susceptible of cultivation was turned to account, every drop of water from the ill-timed winter rains was conserved for the growing season. The application of intelligence and labor to tillage enabled the Hispano-Arab provinces to support a dense population.[1270] These Saracen cultivators had come from the severest training school in all Eurasia. Where the arid tableland of Arabia is buttressed on the southwestern front by high coast ranges (6000 to 10,500 feet or 2000 to 3200 meters) is Yemen, rich in its soil of disintegrated trap rock, adequately watered by the dash of the southwest monsoons against its towering ridges; but practically the whole country is atilt. Consequently the mountains have been terraced from the base often up to 6000 feet. The country presents the aspect of vast agricultural amphitheaters, in which the narrow paths of ancient paving zigzag up and up through successive zones of production. Here is a wide range of fruits—oranges, lemons, figs, dates, bananas and coffee; then apricots, apples, plums, grapes, quinces, peaches, together with grains of various zonal distribution, such as millet, maize, wheat and barley. The terrace walls are from five to eight feet high, but toward the top of the mountains they often increase to fifteen feet. Though laid without mortar, they are kept in perfect repair. Reservoirs filled with water from the two rainy seasons, supply the irrigation channels.[1271] In the narrow valleys of the Nejd plateau in central Arabia and on the mountain slopes of Oman are found the same irrigated gardens and terraced plantations. This laborious tillage underlay the prosperity of the ancient Sabaean monarchy of Yemen, as it explains the population of 35,000 souls who occupy the modern capital of Sanaa, located at an altitude of 7600 feet (2317 meters).[1272]

[Sidenote: In the Himalayas.]

Turning eastward, we find terrace agriculture widely distributed in Himalayan lands. The steep mountain sides of the Vale of Kashmir are cultivated thus to a considerable height. The terraces are irrigated by contour channels constructed along the hillsides, which bring the water for miles from distant snow-fed streams. Their shelf-like fields are green with fruit orchards and almond groves, with vineyards and grain fields.[1273] The terraced slopes about the Himalayan hill-station of Simla (elevation 7100 to 8000 feet) feed the summer population of English, who there take refuge from the deadly heat of the plains. The mountain sections of the native states of Nepal and Bhutan present the view of slopes cut into gigantic stairs, each step a field of waving rice kept saturated by irrigating streams from abundant mountain springs. Farther north, where Himalayas and Hindu Kush meet, terrace agriculture is combined with irrigation in the high Gilgit valleys, and farther still along that mere gash running down from the Pamir dome, called the Hunza Valley. Here live the once lawless robber tribes of the Hunzas and Nagaris, whose conquest cost the British a dangerous and expensive campaign in 1892, but whose extensive terraces of irrigated fields and evidences of skillful tillage gave the whole country an appearance of civilization strangely at variance with the barbarous character of its inhabitants.[1274]

[Sidenote: In Tibet and China.]

North of the outer Himalayan range, near the sources of the Indus and Sutlej rivers in Ladak or Western Tibet, this same form of cultivation has been resorted to by the retarded and isolated Mongolian inhabitants. Here at an altitude of 11,000 feet or more (3354 meters), along mountain ranges of primitive rock yielding only a scant and sterile soil, terraces are laboriously constructed; their surfaces are manured with burnt remains of animal excrements, which must first serve as fuel in this timberless land before they are applied to the ground. In this stronghold of Buddhism almost every lamasery has its terraced fields yielding good crops of grain and fruit.[1275] In the densely populated Sze Chuan province of western China, cultivation has climbed from the fertile basins of the Min and upper Yangtze rivers far up the surrounding mountains, where it is carried on terraces to the foot of vertical cliffs.[1276] Farther north where the mountain province of Shensi occupies the rise of land from the Chinese lowlands to the central highlands of Asia, terraces planted with wheat or other grains cover the mountain slopes.[1277]

[Sidenote: In ancient Peru.]

Terrace tillage is rare in new countries of extensive plains, like the United States and Canada, where the level lands still suffice for the agricultural needs of the people; but in the confined mountain basins and valleys which made up the Inca's territory in ancient Peru, every available natural field was utilized for cultivation, and terraces brought the obstinate mountain sides under the dominion of the Andean peasant. They were constructed, a hundred or more in number, rising 1000 or 1500 feet above the floor of the highland valley, contracting in width as they rose, till the uppermost one was a narrow shelf only two feet broad. These were extended by communal labor year after year, with increase of population, just as to-day in Java and the neighboring islands, and became the property of the Inca. Streams from the higher slopes were conducted in canals and distributed from terrace to terrace, to irrigate and fertilize. These terraces therefore yielded the best crops of potatoes, maize and pulse. The cultivable area was further extended by floating gardens, consisting of rafts covered with earth, which floated on the surface of lakes.[1278] They existed in ancient Mexico also,[1279] and are used to-day in the lakes and streams of Tibet and Kashmir[1280] and the rivers of overcrowded China.

[Sidenote: Terrace agriculture in mountainous islands.]

Mountainous islands, born of volcanic forces or the partial submergence of coastal ranges, have steep surfaces and scant lowlands. Their inhabitants command limited area at best. Driven to agriculture by their isolation, drawn to it by the favorable oceanic climate, such islands develop terrace tillage in its most pronounced form. On the precipitous pitch of Teneriffe, every particle of alluvial soil is collected to make gardens. Long lines of camels, laden with boxes of earth, may be seen coming almost daily into the town of Santa Cruz, bringing soil for the terraces.[1281] This is desperate agriculture. Irrigated terraces scar the steep slopes of many Polynesian islands.[1282] They are highly developed among the Malay Battaks of Sumatra, especially for rice culture.[1283] In Java, Bali and Lombok they reach a perfection hardly equalled elsewhere in the world. In Java they begin at an altitude of 1000 feet, cutting main and branch valleys into amphitheaters, and covering hundreds of square miles.[1284] On the volcanic slopes of Lombok the terrace plots vary from many acres to a few square yards, according to the grade, while a complete system of irrigation uses every brook to water the terraces. Here as in Java the work began at a very early period, when it was probably introduced among the native Malays by Brahmans from India.[1285] Japan, two-thirds of whose area is mountainous, has terraced its steep valley walls often up to 2000 feet or more, and utilized every patch of ground susceptible of tillage.[1286]

[Sidenote: Among mountain savages.]

A mountain environment often occasions a forced development in the form of agriculture among peoples who otherwise still linger in a low stage of barbarism or savagery. The wild, head-hunting Igorots, inhabiting the Cordilleras of north central Luzon, have levelled the face of their mountains into a series of platforms, held by retaining walls from twenty to thirty feet high. On these they cultivate upland rice at an altitude of 5000 feet. The Igorot province of Bontoc contains valleys in which every available foot of land is terraced for rice, and which present artificial landscapes vividly recalling Japan. Labor is the heritage of each inhabitant. Every man, woman and child down to ten years of age shares in the work of providing food.[1287] Africa shows parallel cases. The Angoss people, a savage negro tribe who occupy part of the Murchison Range in northern Nigeria, have mapped out all their sloping land into little terraces, sometimes only a foot or two wide. One of their peaks, 4135 feet high, has its plateau top covered with populous villages, owing to the protection of the site, and every inch of its slope cut into terraces planted with millet and guinea corn.[1288] A more primitive form of this tillage is found in the country of the Marunga negroes, who occupy the steep western face of the rift valley filled by Lake Tanganyika. Here Cameron found the surface not regularly terraced, but retaining walls of loose stones disposed at intervals, which served to hold the soil in place, without greatly altering the natural slope. The scene recalled the terraced heights of Switzerland, and the people working there looked like flies on a wall.[1289] In the semi-arid country of Sudanese Darfur, where only the mountain districts are well watered and thickly populated, small terraces for grain and melons cover all the slopes.[1290]

[Sidenote: Fertilizing]

Mountain agriculture is necessarily laborious. The paucity of arable land precludes the possibility of letting fields lie fallow. These, to prevent exhaustion, must be constantly and abundantly fertilized, all the more as conditions of excessive subaerial denudation found in the steep slope and usual heavy rainfall of mountains, as well as possible glacial scouring of the land in the past, have greatly attenuated the layer of soil called upon to support plant life. The Swiss or Tyrolese farmer cherishes his manure pile as at once source and badge of his wealth. After harvest it is carted or carried in baskets not only to the terraces, but also to the wide alluvial fan that grows his oats and rye, to his meadows and hay fields. Both in Mexico and Peru the soil received a dressing of poudrette. Manuring was most extensive where population was densest, as in the isolated mountain valleys opening out upon the desert coast of Peru. Every kind of organic refuse was utilized, and fish was buried with the kernels of maize as a fertilizer. The deposits of guano found on the headlands and off-shore islands were used from the remotest times. Different guano beds were assigned to the several provinces, and the breeding places of the birds were protected by law.[1291] Ashes and decayed wood were employed for the same purpose, or plants were dug into the soil, while human manure was in Mexico a marketable commodity as in China.[1292]

[Sidenote: Economy of level land for houses and villages.]

In all mountain regions where population has begun to press upon the meager limits of subsistence, level land and soil are at a premium. In ancient Peru space was begrudged for the dead.[1293] Cities covered considerable space on the roomy intermontane plateaus; but in the narrow lateral valleys, houses and temples were built on rocks, in order to reserve every fertile spot for agriculture.[1294] The traveler notices the same thing throughout the Alps. Compact villages cling to the mountain sides, leaving the alluvial hem of the stream or level glacial terrace free for the much needed fields. Only in broad longitudinal valleys, like that of Andermatt, do the settlements complacently spread out their skirts, or on wide alluvial fans where transverse valleys debouch upon the plains. The mountaineers of the Crimea construct their houses against the precipices, excavating into their face and building up the front, with stones, and thus reserve the gentler slopes for vineyards and gardens.[1295] In the Kangra, Kumaon, and Garhwal districts of the British Himalayas, the large Indian villages of the plains give place to small hamlets or detached homesteads, scattered here and there wherever occasional patches of soil on a hillside or in a narrow valley offer hope of sustenance. These hamlets or dwellings are located on the sides of the mountains, because level spots which can be irrigated must be reserved for rice fields.[1296] The high site is also freer from malaria.

[Sidenote: Perpendicular villages]

In the high Himalayan province of Ladak or Western Tibet, this principle of land economy reaches a climax. All settlement is on the perpendicular. The abrupt mountain sides are honey-combed with tombs, villages and Buddhist lamaseries in the detached localities where population occurs. A pleasure walk through one of these Tibetan towns means a climb by steep flights of steps hewn out of the rock, varied by a saunter up ladders, where the sheer face of a cliff must be surmounted to reach the houses on a ledge above.[1297] Pictures of these recall forcibly the cliff-dwellings of the Pueblo Indians. Even the important market city of Leh covers the lower slope of the mountain at an altitude of 11,500 feet, and from its height overlooks the cultivated fields in the sandy valley bed below, made fertile by irrigating streams from debouching canons.[1298] The Ladak villages always shun the plains. The desire to economize level arable land does not alone dictate this choice of sites, however; the motive of protection against inundation, when the snows melt and the streams swell, and also, to some degree, against hostile attack, is an additional factor. In the mountainous parts of overcrowded China, again, the food problem is the dominant motive. In the rugged highland province of Shensi, a village of several hundred people covers only a few acres, and rises in closely packed tiers of houses against the mountain side.[1299] In the wilder, half-conquered parts of Sze Chuan the villages crown the lower peaks, cling to the base of the mountains, or are perched on ledges of rock overlooking the gorges. Among the steep cliffs bordering the upper Yangtze, occupied chiefly by the timid, displaced Mantze aborigines, at an altitude of 10,000 feet, small platforms resting on beams projecting from the sheer mountain face support minute houses, whose backs burrow into the cliff behind. The small children are tied to the door post, to keep them from falling into the millet field below. The house is accessible only by bolts driven into the cliff. Above and below is the farm—small patches of tilled soil, often not larger than a bath towel, to which the cultivator lowers himself by a rope.[1300] Here life hovers on the brink of death and despair.

[Sidenote: Mountain pastures and stock-raising.]

Paucity of arable land in mountain regions leads to the utilization of the untillable slopes for stock grazing. This industry is always a valuable ally to mountain agriculture on account of the manure which it yields; but in high altitudes, where the steepness or rockiness of the soil, cold and the brevity of the growing season restrict or eliminate cereal crops, it becomes the dominant occupation of the inhabitants, while agriculture takes a subordinate place, limited to the production of hay and fodder for the winter feeding of the stock. Above the line of tree growth flourish the natural summer pastures up to the border of perpetual snow; and just below lies a zone which, if cleared of its forests, supports a thick carpet of grass and herbage, though too cold to ripen grain.

The high pastures are particularly nourishing. Cows feeding here in the Alps give better milk than the "home" or valley cows, though a smaller quantity. Sheep and goats do equally well, but swine are profitable only as a by-product, to utilize the refuse of the cheese and butter industry. The area of these pastures far exceeds that of arable land in mountain regions. In Switzerland they comprise about 27 per cent. of the total productive area; hay meadows 24 per cent., but fields and gardens only 20 per cent.[1301] In the Austrian province of Salzburg, pastures make up 13.3 per cent., hay meadows 34.5 per cent., and tilled fields only 11.7 per cent. of the total productive area. In the Tyrol the figures are much the same.[1302] Since Norway has over 67 per cent. of its total area in bare mountains, snow fields, bogs and lakes, it is not surprising to find only 7.6 per cent. in pastures, 2.2 per cent. in meadows, and 0.7 per cent. in grain fields; but here the pastures are ten times the arable area.[1303] The season of the summer feeding on the grass lands is short. In the so-called High Alps it frequently lasts only six or seven weeks, in the Grisons at most thirteen weeks[1304] and in Norway from two to three months.[1305]

High mountain regions, practically restricted to this Graswirthschaft, soon reach their maximum of prosperity and population. The amount of hay secured for the winter feeding limits the number of cattle, and the number of the cattle, through their manure, fixes the valley hay supply. Alpine pastures cannot be enlarged, and they may be reduced by accidents of nature, such as landslides, devastating torrents, or advance of ice fields or glaciers. They cannot be improved by capital and labor, and they may deteriorate chemically by exhaustion. The constant export of butter and cheese from Alpine pastures in recent times, without substitution by any fertilizer beyond the local manure, has caused the diminution of phosphoric acid in the soil and hence impoverishment. Canton Glarus has shown a steady decline since 1630 in the number of cows which its mountain pastures can support.[1306] Many other Alpine districts show the same deterioration.

[Sidenote: Mountain herdsman and shepherds.]

The remoteness of these highland pastures from the permanent villages necessitates Sennenwirthschaft, or the maintenance of out-farms and shepherds on the mountains during the grazing season. This involves a semi-nomadic existence for such inhabitants as serve as herdmen. In June, as soon as the high pastures begin to grow green, cattle, sheep and goats ascend step by step in the wake of summer, as she climbs the slope, and they return in autumn to the valleys. There they feed on the stubble of hay and grain fields, till the increasing cold confines them to their low stables. The hut of the Senner or Saeter, as the herdsman is variously called in Switzerland and Norway, consists of a living room and a smaller apartment for making butter and cheese, while against the steep slope is a rude stone shelter for the cattle and goats. The predominance of summer pastures has made cattle-raising a conspicuous part of agriculture in the Alps and in Norway. In many parts of Switzerland, cattle are called "wares" and the word cheese is used as a synonym for food, as we use bread. A Swiss peasant who has a reputation for cheese making is popular with the girls.[1307] Here even Cupid turns dairy expert.

[Sidenote: Communal ownership of mountain pastures.]

Since it is scarcely practicable to divide these highland pastures, they have generally remained communal property, whether in Norway,[1308] Switzerland, the Bavarian Alps, the British Himalayan districts,[1309] Nepal and Bhutan,[1310] or Kashmir.[1311] In Europe their use is generally regulated. As a rule, a Swiss villager may keep on the Allmende during the summer as many head of cattle as he is able to stall-feed during the winter. Any in excess of this number must be paid for at a fixed rate to the village or commune treasury.[1312] Hay-sheds and herdsmen's huts mark these districts of temporary occupation near the altitude limits of human life throughout Europe. In Asia, likewise, are to be found small villages, inhabited only in summer by herdsmen tending their flocks. Such is the hamlet of Minemerg, located at an altitude of about 8000 feet at the southern entrance to the Borzil Pass over the Western Himalayas, and Sonamerg (altitude 8650 feet or 2640 meters) just below the Zogi La Pass, both of them surrounded by rich meadows on the northern rim of the Vale of Kashmir.[1313]

The utilization of mountain pastures for stock raising is almost universal. In the arid highlands of Central Asia, it is the essential supplement to the pastoral nomadism of the steppes and deserts, and to the limited sedentary agriculture found along the irrigated piedmont slopes. Here and elsewhere the animal raised varies widely-the llama and vicuna in Peru, which thrive best at 10,000 to 13,000 feet elevation, and multiply rapidly on the ichu or coarse grass which clothes the slopes of the higher Andes up to snow line; sheep, goats, yaks and herds of dzo, a useful hybrid between yak and cow, in the highland districts of Sze Chuan. Here the Mantze mountaineers lock their houses and leave their villages deserted, while they camp with their herds on the high pastures at 10,000 feet or more.[1314] Only economical, ingenious Japan has failed to develop stock raising, though mountains comprise two-thirds of its area. The explanation has often been sought in Buddhism, which inhibits the use of animal food; but this religious rule probably found ready acceptance in Japan, just because the paucity of animal food made its observance easy, for the fish industry of the Empire never suffered from the inhibition. The reason is probably to be sought elsewhere. The native grass of Japan, which relentlessly crowds out all imported grazing crops, is a bamboo grass with sharp, hard, serrated edges, and is said to cut the entrails of horses and sheep.[1315]

[Sidenote: Haymaking in high mountains.]

While the high pastures are ample for the summer feeding, the chief problem of mountain stock-farmers is to secure feed for the winter support of their animals. This taxes their industry and ingenuity to the utmost. While the herdsmen are away tending their charges on the heights, the rest of the population are kept busy at home, getting fodder for the six or seven months of stall-feeding. This includes the cultivation of hardy crops like oats, rye and barley, which will mature at a great altitude, hay-making and collecting twigs and even leaves for the less fastidious goats. In Switzerland as in Norway the art of mowing has reached its highest pitch. Grass only three inches high is cut thrice yearly. The Norwegian peasant gathers a small hay harvest from the roofs of his house and barns, and from the edges of the highways. In Switzerland not a spear of grass escapes. In places inaccessible to cattle and goats, the peasant gathers hay by the handful with crampons on his feet, generally from the ledges of cliffs. He stacks it in one spot, and brings it down to the valley by sledge in winter. He is the Wildheuer or wild hay gatherer. His life is so dangerous, that the law permits only one Wildheuer to a family.[1316] In high Alpine cantons this office is the privilege of the poor.[1317] The traveler in Norway frequently sees huge bundles of hay sliding down to the valley on wires stretched from some high point on the precipitous fiord wall. This represents the harvest from isolated spots or from the field of the summer shepherd. In the vicinity of every saeter hut, a plot of ground is fenced in, enriched with the manure gathered during the summer, and utilized to grow fine nourishing grass, which is mown and transported down to the valley farm.[1318] Here economy of vegetative resources reaches its climax.

[Sidenote: Methods of curing hay in mountains.]

In mountain regions of heavy rainfall, thick dew and numerous cloudy days, it becomes a problem to get the hay dried and stored before a drenching shower comes. In many parts of Switzerland, therefore, the peasant on a clear morning cuts a limited amount of grass. This, with the help of his wife and children, he diligently turns and tosses at short intervals all day long, thus subjecting it to a rapid curing process by the action of the wind and the sun, whose rays are doubly effective in the rarefied air of the heights. In the evening the hay is made up into bundles and carried on his back to the barn. In other parts of Switzerland the green hay is hung on horizontal poles arranged against the sunny side of the chalet and under its projecting roof, thus exposed to the heat and protected from the rain till cured. In Norway the same purpose is achieved by setting up in the fields racks supporting long horizontal bars, over which the newly cut grass is hung. There it is exposed to the gentle fanning of the wind and penetrated by the warmth of the sun, in the short intervals when the sky is not overcast; and during a shower it sheds the water immediately, so that a minimum of harm is done. In the mountains of Germany, the hay is stacked on cone-shaped racks made of poles, with lateral projections which support the grass; thus the air can circulate freely inside the hollow cone, which is lifted well above the ground. Elsewhere sharpened stakes provided with cross bars are simply driven into the ground, and on these the hay is draped till cured.

Mountain hay-making leaves nothing to chance; too much depends upon the crop. In fact, at high altitudes it becomes the only crop. Cereal culture drops off with every increase of elevation. Norway has few fields above 1600 feet;[1319] even barley fails to ripen above 2600 feet. In the mountains of Wuertenberg we find pure Graswirthschaft at 3000 feet elevation, with only a small garden patch near the dwelling.[1320] It is interesting to take a tramp up one of the longitudinal or lateral valleys of the Alps, and observe the economic basis of life gradually change from agriculture to hay-making, till in some high-laid Alpine cirque, like Bad Leuk or Barmaz at the head of the Val d'Ilez, one sees only meadows and an occasional potato patch, which impresses the lowlander as a last despairing effort in the struggle for existence.

[Sidenote: Winter industries of mountain peoples.]

Where climate and soil do so little for the support of life, man must do much. Work must in some way be made to compensate for an ungenerous Nature. The closely housed existence necessitated by the long severe winters of high altitudes stimulates industries in the home. The winter feeding of the stock involves little labor, so the abundant leisure would otherwise be wasted. Hence it is no accident that we find almost everywhere native mountain industries in a high state of development, and often characterized by an artistic beauty which seems to be the one flower of this barren environment. They are naturally based upon the local raw materials of the mountains, such as wood, metals, clays, and especially the wool of sheep and goats. Moreover, their products are articles of small bulk and large value, adapted to costly mountain transportation. Those of Kashmir are typical-carved wood, artistic metal work in silver and copper, puttoo cloth, carpets and the famous Kashmir shawls.[1321] The stark life of Tibet shows in its industries an unexpected richness and beauty. The men spin and weave wool into puttoo cloth of all grades; some of it is extraordinarily fine in texture and color, and is exported by caravan in considerable quantity to northern China and Mongolia. Pastil sticks, made of aromatic wood and impregnated with musk and gold-dust, are a conspicuous commodity in the trade with Peking. Tibet is rich in metals, especially silver and gold. Even the nomad shepherds of the tablelands know how to purify gold-dust over a fire of argols; hence it is not surprising that the settlements in the irrigated mountain valleys should develop real artists in metallurgy.[1322] The province of Derge, which excels in metal work, produces swords, guns, teapots, bells and seals of extremely artistic design and perfect finish.[1323] The jewelry of Tibet suggests Byzantine work. It includes ear-rings and charm boxes of gold and carved turquoise, and is marked by the same delicate finish. But whether the Tibetan is working in wood, gold, brass, or wool, he uses native designs of real merit, and shows the expert craftsman's hand.[1324] His activities recall the metal work of the Caucasus and the famous rugs of Daghestan.

Turning to Europe we find watch and clock making in the Black Forest and the Jura, wood-carving in the Swiss and Norwegian mountains, bobbin lace in the Erz range and in Alpine Appenzell, and the far more beautiful Italian product of the rugged Abruzzi and the Frioulian Alps. The Slovaks of highland Hungary are expert in wire-drawing,[1325] and the peasant of the central Apennines makes from the gut of his goats the finest violin strings in the world, the so-called Roman strings.[1326] The low Thuringian and Franconian Forests, which harbor denser populations, have by a minute subdivision of labor turned their local resources to the making of dolls, which they supply to the markets of the world. Here too the manufacture of glass articles, porcelains, majolica and terra-cotta flourishes.[1327] Most of these mountain industries merely supplement the scant agricultural resources; they represent the efforts of industrious but hard pressed people to eke out their meager subsistence.

[Sidenote: Overpopulation and emigration.]

The application of steam to industry has converted mountain regions of abundant mineral wealth into centers of production for the markets of the world. But this is the history of only the last century, and of only favored mountain regions. The utilization of waterpower for electricity in factories is transforming the piedmont belts of the Alps and Apennines; but life in the interior of these ranges remains unaltered by the denser population at their base, except for the increased demand for the butter, milk and cheese of the highland pastures. For the world at large, therefore, the obvious and persistent fact of mountain economy is a scanty food supply secured by even the most intelligent and untiring labor, and a fixed tendency to overpopulation. The simplest remedy for this evil is emigration, a fact which Malthus observed.[1328] Hence emigration is an almost universal phenomenon in highland regions. Sometimes it is only seasonal. It takes place in the fall after the field work is over, and is due to the paucity of industries possible in the mountains during the winter. It seems to be a recurrence of that nomadic note in the motif of mountain life—that migration in summer upward to the borders of the snow, in winter downward to the sun-warmed plains. In autumn the Swiss descend from the Jura and Alps in great numbers to cities, seeking positions as servants or pastry-cooks. The Auvergnats leave their home by the thousand in the fall, when snow covers the mountains, to work in the cities as hewers of stone and drawers of water, then return in summer to resume their tasks in field and pasture, bringing back sums of money which noticeably enrich the home districts.[1329]

[Sidenote: Forms of temporary emigration.]

This seasonal emigration often assumes the form of peddling, in order to dispose of small home-made wares. From the Basilicata and Modena Apennines the young men follow the pedler's trade, but the Basilicata village of Viggiano furnishes Italy with many wandering musicians.[1330] The Kabyles of the Atlas Mountains go out in parties of two or three in the fall, and hawk every kind of goods, bringing back from their journey quantities of wool for home weaving.[1331] The emigration may last for several years, but finally the love of home generally calls the mountaineer back to his rugged hills. The Galicians of the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain leave their poor country for a time for the richer provinces of Portugal and Spain, where they become porters, water-carriers and scavengers, and are known as boorish, but industrious and honest. The women from the neighboring mountain province of Asturias are the professional wet-nurses of Spain. They are to be seen in every aristocratic household of Madrid, but return to the mountains with their savings when their period of service ends.[1332] In mountainous Basutoland, the Kaffir Switzerland of South Africa, arable land and pastures are utilized as completely as local methods of husbandry permit; and yet the native Kaffirs go in large numbers—28,000 out of a total population of 220,000 in 1895—to work in the mines of Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. They also return in time with their savings.[1333] Similarly the Battaks of the rugged mountain-rimmed plateau of western Sumatra emigrate in increasing numbers to the lowlands, and hire themselves out for a term of years on the Dutch plantations.[1334]

Another interesting and once rather widespread phase of this temporary emigration appears in the mercenary troops formerly drawn from mountain regions. After the Burgundian wars of the fifteenth century, the Swiss became the mercenaries of Europe, and in 1503 were first employed as papal life-guards. They served the kings of France from Louis XL till the tragedy of the Tuileries in 1792; and in that country and elsewhere they made the name "Switzer" a synonym for guard or attendant,[1335] till in 1848 the mercenary system was abolished. The pressure of population at home and the military spirit of the Scotch Highlanders once led the young Gaels to seek their fortunes in military service abroad, as in the army of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden.[1336] Gurkhas from Himalayan Nepal, an independent state, are employed in considerable numbers in the Indian army to-day, and constitute one of the most reliable divisions of the native troops. In January, 1901, there were 12,797 Gurkhas drawing pay from the Indian government as soldiers, besides 6000 more employed as military police, porters, and in other capacities.[1337] Similarly ancient Arcadia, the mountain core of Peloponnesus, was a constant hive of mercenaries.

[Sidenote: Permanent emigration.]

Often, however, permanent emigration is the result, robbing the mountain population of its most enterprising element, Piedmontese, Bergamese, and Frioulians from the Italian Alps leave their country in large numbers. Many of them find work in Marseilles and other towns of southern France, infusing an Italian strain into the population there and making serious competition for the local French. A proverb says there is no country in the world without sparrows and Bergamese.[1338] Geneva, once the citadel of Calvinism, is to-day a Catholic town, owing to the influx of Catholic laborers from Alpine Savoy. The overflow of the redundant population of this mountain province has given the Swiss canton a character diametrically opposed to its traditions.[1339] The Chinese provinces of Chili and Manchuria have been largely populated by immigrants from the barren mountain peninsula of Shantung; Manchuria has thereby been converted from an alien into a native district.[1340]

Emigration on so large a scale exercises far reaching economic and historical influences. Norse colonization contributed interesting chapters to the history of Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. Norwegians who have flocked to America have made a deep impress upon our Northwestern States. Switzerland in 1902 and 1903 gave as 9500 of its subjects, a valuable contribution. Scotchmen of Highland birth are scattered over the whole world, carrying with them everywhere their sturdy qualities of character. Even the stay-at-home French lose emigrants from their mountain districts. The people of the Basses-Alps go to Mexico, and the Basques from the French Pyrenees seek Argentine.[1341] The honesty, industry, and frugality of these mountain emigrants make them desirable elements in any colonial population, and insure their success when they seek their fortunes in the uncrowded western world.

The alternative to overpopulation and its remedy emigration is found in preventive checks to increase. These sometimes take the form of restricted or late marriages, as Malthus found to be the case in Norway and Switzerland in 1799,[1342] before the introduction of steam or electric motive power had stimulated the industries of these countries or facilitated emigration thence. The same end is achieved by the widespread religious celibacy which sometimes characterizes mountain communities. In the barren Auvergne Plateau of France, the number of younger sons who become priests is extraordinary. Many daughters become nuns. Celibacy, seconded by extensive emigration, clears the field for the eldest son and the system of primogeniture which the poverty of this rugged highland has established as a fixed institution in the Auvergne.[1343] A careful statistical investigation of the geographical origins of the Catholic priesthood in Europe might throw interesting light on the influences of environment. The harsh conditions of mountain life make the monastery a line of least resistance, while geographical isolation nourishes the religions nature and benumbs the intellectual activities.

It is in the corrugated highland of Tibet, chilled to barrenness by an elevation of 12,000 feet or more (4000 meters), sterile and treeless from aridity, carved by canon-cutting streams into deep gorges offering a modicum of arable soil for irrigation, that monasticism has developed into an effective system to keep down population. Buddhism, with its convents and lamaseries, naturally recommended itself to a country where asceticism was obviously expedient. The world shows nowhere else so large a celibate class. In Tibet, monks are estimated at 175,000 to 500,000 in a total population of three millions. Archibald Little estimates their number at one-third of the total male population.[1344] Derge, which is the most productive district both agriculturally and industrially of eastern Tibet and is also most densely inhabited, counts at least 10,000 lamas in a total population of about 42,000.[1345] Not less than one-sixth of the inhabitants of Ladak are in religious houses as monks and nuns.[1346] Families in Tibet are small, yet each devotes one or more children to convent or monastic life.[1347] In western Tibet, especially about Taklakot in the Himalayan border, one boy in every family is invariably devoted to the priesthood, and one or more daughters must become nuns. But the nun generally resides with her family or lives in some monastery—with unspeakable results.[1348]

[Sidenote: Polyandry.]

The Tibetans seem to be enthusiastic Malthusians, with all the courage of their convictions. Religious celibacy among them is only an adjunct to another equally effective social device for restricting population. This is the institution of polyandry, which crops out in widely distributed mountain regions of limited resources, just as it appears not infrequently in primitive island societies. Its sporadic occurrence in extensive lowlands, as among the Warraus of Guiana and certain tribes of the Orinoco, is extremely rare, as also its occasional appearance among pastoral steppe-dwellers, like the Hottentots and Damaras.[1349] It is often associated with polygamy where wealth exists, and is never the exclusive form of marriage, yet its frequency among mountain peoples is striking. Strabo describes fraternal polyandry as it existed in mountainous Yemen. There among a Semitic people, as to-day in Mongolian Tibet and among the aboriginal Todas of the Nilgiri Hills in peninsular India, the staff of one husband left at the door of the house excluded the others.[1350] In modern times the institution is found throughout Tibet, and in the Himalayan and sub-Himalayan districts adjoining it, as in Ladak, Kunawar, Kumaon, Garhwal, Spiti, Sirmur, among the Miris, Daphlas, Abors and Bhutias occupying the southern slope of the Himalayans eastward from Sikkim, and the Murmese tribes of the Khasia Hills just to the south. The same practice occurs among the Coorgs of the Western Ghats, among the Nairs at the coastal piedmont of this range, among the Todas of the mountain stronghold known as the Nilgiri Hills (peaks 8000 feet or 2630 meters), and it crops out sporadically among certain mountain Bantu tribes of South Africa.[1351]

[Sidenote: Female infanticide.]

There seems little doubt that polyandry, as Herbert Spencer maintains, has been adopted as an obvious and easy check upon increase of population in rugged countries.[1352] It is generally coupled with other preventive checks. In the Nilgiri Hills, as we found also to be the case on many Polynesian islands, it is closely associated with female infanticide.[1353] The Todas in 1867 showed a proportion of two men to one woman, but later, with the decline of infanticide under British rule, a proportion of 100 men to 75 women, and a resulting modification of the institution of polyandry.[1354] It may well be that the paucity of women suggested this form of marriage, whose expediency as an ally to infanticide in checking population later became apparent. The Todas are a very primitive folk of herdsmen, living on the produce of their buffaloes, averse to agriculture, though not inhibited from it by the nature of their country, therefore prone to seek any escape from that uncongenial employment,[1355] and relying on the protected isolation of their habitat to compensate for the weakness inherent in the small number of the tribe.

Throughout Tibet and Ladak polyandry works hand in hand with the lamaseries in limiting population. The conspicuous fact in Tibetan polyandry is its restriction to the agricultural portion of the population. The pastoral nomads of the country, depending on their yaks, sheep and goats, wandering at will over a very wide, if desolate territory, practice monogamy and polygamy.[1356] The sedentary population, on the other hand, is restricted to tillable lands so small that each farm produces only enough for one family. Subdivision under a divided inheritance would be disastrous to these dwarf estates, especially owing to possible complications growing out of irrigating rights.[1357] Polyandry leaves the estate and the family undivided, and by permitting only one wife to several fraternal husbands restricts the number of children. It does this also in another way by diminishing the fertility of the mothers; for all travelers comment upon the paucity of children in polyandrous families.

Westermarck lays stress upon the fact that polyandry prevails chiefly in sterile countries. He regards it less as a conscious device to check increase of population than a result of the disproportion of males to females in polyandrous communities. The preponderance of male births he attributes to the excessive endogamy bordering on inbreeding which tends to prevail in all isolated mountain valleys; and also, as a possibility, to the undernourished condition of the parents caused by scanty food supplies, which Duesing found to be productive of a high percentage of male births in proportion to female.[1358] The motive of restricting population seems entitled to more weight than Westermarck concedes to it; for he slurs over the fact that in Tibet polyandry gives rise to a large number of superfluous women who fill the nunneries,[1359] while in the Nilgiri Hills redundant females were eliminated by infanticide. The fact seems to be that in the institution of polyandry we have a social and psychological effect of environment, reinforced by a physiological effect.

[Sidenote: Effects of polyandry and polygamy.]

A comparison of social conditions in the adjoining provinces of Baltistan and Ladak, which together comprise the Himalayan valley of the Indus, reveals the character of polyandry as a response to geographic environment. Both provinces are inhabited by a Mongolian stock, but the Ladaki living on the uppermost stretch of the basin near Tibet are Buddhists and polyandrists, while the Baltis farther down the valley are Mussulmen and polygamists. The Baltis, with their plurality of wives and numerous children, are wretchedly poor and live in squalor on the verge of starvation; but as the elevation of their valley ranges only from 4000 to 8500 feet, they are inured to heat, and therefore emigrate in large numbers to the neighboring Mohammedan province of the Punjab, where they work as coolies and navvies. The Ladakis, on the other hand, living 9000 to 13,000 feet above the sea, die of bilious fever when they reach the lowlands. Cut off from emigration, they curtail population by means of polyandry and lamaseries. Consequently they show signs of prosperity, are well fed, well clothed and comfortably housed.[1360] Baltistan's social condition illustrates in a striking way the power of an idea like an alien creed, assimilated as the result of close vicinal location, to counteract for a time the influences of local geographic conditions.

[Sidenote: Marauding tendencies in mountaineers]

The less civilized mountain peoples, whose tastes or low economic status unfit them for emigration, solve the problem of a deficient food supply by raiding the fields and stores of their richer neighbors. Predatory expeditions fill the history of primitive mountain peoples, and of the ancient occupants of highland regions which are now devoted to honest industry. The ancient Alpine tribes were one and all, from the Mediterranean to the Danube, "poor and addicted to robbery," as Strabo says. He analyzes their condition with nice discrimination. "The greater part [of the Alps], especially the summits of the mountains inhabited by robbers, are barren and unfruitful, both on account of the frost and the ruggedness of the land. Because of the want of food and other necessaries, the mountaineers have sometimes been obliged to spare the inhabitants of the plains, that they might have some people to supply them."[1361] The freebooters usually descended into the lowlands of Italy, Gaul and Helvetia, but the pass peoples lay in wait for their prey on the mountain roads. Strabo described the same marauding habits arising from the same cause among the mountaineers of northern Spain,[1362] the Balkan range,[1363] and the highlands encircling the Mesopotamian plains.[1364]

Hunger is usually the spur. The tribesmen who inhabit the Hunza gorge were notorious robbers till their recent conquest by the British. Despite the most careful terrace tillage, their country was much overpopulated. The supply of grain was so inadequate, that during the summer the people subsisted wholly on fruit, reserving the grain for winter use. Therefore, when early summer opened the passes of the Karakorum and Himalayan ranges, and caravans began to move over the trade route between Kashmir and Yarkand, when the Kirghis nomads from the plains sought the pastures of the Pamir, the Hunza tribesmen found raiding caravans and herds, and pillaging the Gilgit Valley of Baltistan the easiest means of supplementing their slender resources. Hardy mountaineers as they were, and born fighters, they always conducted their forays successfully, and returned to the shelter of their fastnesses, laden with plunder and driving their captive flocks before them. The perpetual menace of these Hunza raids caused large districts in the Gilgit Valley to be abandoned by their inhabitants, and cultivated land to lapse into wilderness,[1365] while the Chilas to the south pillaged the Astor Valley of Baltistan, carrying away crops and cattle, enslaving women and children.[1366]

[Sidenote: Cattle-lifting.]

Marauding propensities are marked among all retarded mountain peoples of modern times. The cattle-lifting clans of the Scotch Highlands, who preyed upon the Lowlands, have their counterpart in the Pathans of the Suleiman and Baluch mountain border who, till curbed by the British power in India, systematically pillaged the plains of the Sind.[1367] The forest Bhils of the Vindhyan and Satpura ranges are scarcely yet married to agriculture; so when in time of drought their crops fail and the game abandons the hill forests to seek water in the lowland jungles, the Bhils cheerfully revert to their ancestral habit of cattle-lifting.[1368]

The Caucasus was long a breeding place for robber tribes who made their forays into the pastures and fields of southern Russia. Robbery was part of the education of every Circassian prince, while one group of the Abassines conferred their chieftainship upon the most successful robber or the man of largest family.[1369] The Kurdish hillmen of the Armenian ranges descend with their herds of horses in winter to the warmer plains, where they exhaust the pastures and subject the Armenian villages to a regular system of blackmail.[1370] The wide grassy plains about Koukou Nor Lake, near the Chinese border of Tibet, attract numerous Mongol nomads with their herds; but these rich pastures are exposed to the depredation of Si Fan brigand tribes, who have their haunts in the deep, impenetrable gorges of the neighboring mountains, and carefully guard all the approaches to the same. They are Buddhists, but worship a special Divinity of Brigandage, to whom their lamas offer prayers for the success of every foray.[1371] Hence, among mountain as among desert peoples, robbery tends to become a virtue; environment dictates their ethical code.

[Sidenote: Historical results of mountain raiding.]

These depredations reflect to a great degree the complementary relation of highlands and lowlands. The plains possess what the mountains lack. This is a fundamental fact of economic geography, and inevitably leads to historical results. The marauding expeditions of mountain peoples first acquire historical importance, either when the raids after long continuance end in the conquest of the lowlands, and thus augment the resources and population of the highland state; or, as is often the case, the raiders call down upon themselves the vengeance of the plainsmen, are subdued, and embodied in the lowland state. The conquest of ancient Assyria and the destruction of Nineveh by the mountain Medes seems to have been a process of this kind. Long before their descent upon Mesopotamia, they were known as the "dangerous Medes," were constantly threatening the Assyrian frontiers and occupying isolated tracts.[1372] The predatory incursions of the Samnites of the Apennines into the fertile fields of Campania eventuated in the conquest of ancient Capua and other cities, and greatly strengthened the Samnite Confederacy. But this encroachment of the mountain tribes upon the plains aroused the cupidity and alarm of the Romans, who in turn bent their energies toward the final subjugation of the Samnites.[1373] Himalayan Nepal, after the unification of its petty Rajah states by the Gurkha conquest between 1768 and 1790, began encroachments and ravages upon the Indian Terai or fertile alluvial lowland at the foot of the mountains; and finally by 1858 had acquired title to a considerable strip of it, which by its rice fields and forests greatly strengthened the geographic and economic base of the highland state.[1374] The Malay Hovas, inhabiting the central plateau of Madagascar, braced to effort by its temperate climate and not over-generous soil, have almost everywhere subdued the better fed but sluggish lowlanders of the coast.[1375] There can be little doubt that the beneficent effects of an invigorating mountain climate, especially in tropical and subtropical latitudes, have helped the hardy, active hill people to make easy conquest of the enervated plainsmen.

[Sidenote: Conquest of mountain regions]

It is more often the case, however, that the scant resources, small number, and divided political condition of the mountain tribes make such conquest impossible. Their depredations provoke reprisals from the stronger states of the plain, who bring the mountain region under subjection, merely to police their frontier. Strabo makes it clear that the Romans, having secured certain passes over the Alps, neglected the conquest of the ranges, till the increase of Roman colonies along the piedmont rim excited the cupidity of the mountaineers. Muscovite dominion was extended over the Caucasus, both in order to check the persistent raids of its tribes into the Russian plains, and to secure control of its passes. The state of Kashmir, guided by a purely local policy, for years tried to conquer the robber tribes on its northwestern frontier, merely to protect its own border provinces. Then the British authorities of the Indian Empire began the same process, but from a radically different motive. They saw the Gilgit and Hunza valleys, like the Chitral to the west, as highways through a mountain transit land, whose opposite approaches were held by the Russians.[1376]

Such conquests, whatever be their motive, profit the vanquished in the end more than the victor. They result in the systematic and intelligent development of the mountain resources, and the maintenance of ampler social and economic relations between highland and lowland through the construction of roads, which must always represent the reach of the governing authority. The conquest of mountain peoples means always expensive and protracted campaigns. The invader has always two enemies to fight, Nature and the armed foe. There is a saying in India that "In Gilgit a small army is annihilated and a large army starves to death." Hunger is king in high altitudes, and comes always to the defense of mountain independence. Moreover, the inaccessibility of such districts, the difficulty of maintaining lines of communication, ignorance of by-paths and trails which forever offer strategic opportunities to the natives or escape at a crisis, all serve to protract the war. The independent spirit of the mountaineer, his endurance of hardships, his mastery of mountain tactics, and his obstinate resistance after repeated defeat, give always a touch of heroism to highland warfare. Consequently, history abounds in examples of unconquered mountain peoples, or of long sustained resistance, like that which for sixty years under the heroic leadership of Kadi Mulah and Shamyl used up the treasure and troops of Russia in the impregnable defiles of the Caucasus. In the end, however, the highland tribes succumb to numbers and the road-making engineer.

[Sidenote: Political dismemberment of mountain peoples.]

Political dismemberment, lack of cohesion due to the presence of physical barriers impeding intercourse, is the inherent weakness of mountain peoples. Political consolidation is never voluntary. It is always forced upon them from without, either by foreign conquest or by the constant menace of such conquest, which compels the mountain clans to combine for common defense of their freedom. The combination thus made is reluctant, loose, easily broken, generally short-lived. It becomes close and permanent only under a constant pressure from without, and then assumes a form allowing to the constituent parts the greatest possible measure of independence. The Swiss canton and commune are the result of a segregating environment; the Swiss Republic is the result of threatened encroachments by the surrounding states. It owed its first genuine federal constitution to Napoleon.

A report on the situation in the Caucasus, addressed to Czar Nicholas in 1829, contains an epitome of the history of mountain peoples. It runs as follows: "The Circassians bar out Russia from the south, and may at their pleasure open or close the passage to the nations of Asia. At present their intestine dissensions, fostered by Russia, hinder them from uniting under one leader; but it must not be forgotten that, according to traditions religiously preserved among them, the sway of their ancestors extended as far as to the Black Sea. * * * The imagination is appalled at the consequence which their union under one leader might have for Russia, which has no other bulwark against their ravages than a military line, too extensive to be very strong."[1377] Here we have the whole story—a mountain people pillaging the lowlands, exercising a dangerous and embarrassing control over the passes, and thereby calling down upon themselves conquest from without; weakened by a contracting territory within the highlands and a shrinking area of plunder without, doomed to eventual defeat by the yet more ominous weakness of political dismemberment.

[Sidenote: Individualism and independence]

Mountain tribes are always like a pack of hounds on the leash, each straining in a different direction. Wall-like barriers, holding them apart for centuries, make them almost incapable of concerted action, and restive under any authority but their own. Clan and tribal societies, feudal and republican rule, always on a small scale, characterize mountain sociology. All these are attended by an exaggerated individualism and its inevitable concomitant, the blood feud. Mountain policy tends to diminish the power of the central authority to the vanishing point, giving individualism full scope. Social and economic retardation, caused by extreme isolation and encouraged by protected location, tend to keep the social body small and loosely organized. Every aspect of environment makes against social integration.

The broken relief of ancient Greece produced the small city state; but in the rugged mountains of Arcadia the principle of physical and political subdivision went farther. Here, for four centuries after the first Olympiad, the population, poorest and rudest of all Greece, was split up into petty hill villages, each independent of the other.[1378] The need of resisting Spartan aggression led for the first time, in 371 B.C., to the formation of a commune Arcadum, a coalescence of all the fractional groups constituting the Arcadian folk;[1379] but even this union, effected only by the masterly manipulation of the Theban Epaminondas, proved short-lived and incomplete. What was true of the Arcadian villages was true of the city states of Greece. The geography of the land instilled into them the principle of political aloofness, except when menaced by foreign conquest. Cooperation is efficient only when it springs from a habit of mind. Greek union against the Persians was very imperfect; and against the Roman, the feeble leagues were wholly ineffective. The influence of this dismembering environment still persists. As ancient Greece was a complex of city states, modern Greece is a complex of separate districts, each of which holds chief place in the minds of its citizens, and unconsciously but steadily operates against the growth of a national spirit in the modern sense.[1380]

[Sidenote: Types of mountain states.]

A mountain environment encourages political disunion in several forms. Sometimes it favors the survival of a turbulent feudal nobility, based upon clan organization, as among the medieval Scotch, who were not less rebellious toward their own kings than toward the English conquerors.[1381] Feudal rule seems congenial to the mountaineer, whose conservative nature, born of isolation, clings to hereditary chiefs and a long established order. Feudal communities and dwarf republics exist side by side in the northern Caucasus,[1382] attended by that primitive assertion of individual right, the blood feud.[1383] Often the two forms of government are combined, but the feudal element is generally only a dwindling survival from a remote past. The little Republic of Andorra, which for a thousand years has preserved its existence in the protection of a high Pyrenean valley, is a self-governing community, organized strictly along the lines of a Tyrolese or Swiss commune; but the two viguiers or agents, who in some matters outrank the president, are official appointments tracing back to feudal days, when Andorra was a seigneurie of the Comte of Urgel.[1384] Tyrol offers a striking parallel to this. In its local affairs it has in effect a republican form of government, enjoying as high degree of autonomy as any Swiss canton; but the great Brenner route, which could confer both power and wealth on its possessor, made the Tyrol an object of conquest to the feudal nobles of the early Middle Ages. Their hereditary dominion is now vested in the archdukes of Austria, to whom the Tyrolese have shown unfailing fidelity, but from whom they have exacted complete recognition of their rights.[1385]

Tyrol's neighbor Switzerland illustrates the pure form of commune, canton and republic, which is the logical result of a rugged mountain relief. Here commune and canton are the real units of government. In the federal power at Bern the Swiss peasant takes little interest, often not even knowing the name of the national president. In the highest ranges a canton coincides with a mountain-rimmed valley—Valais with the basin of the upper Rhone, Glarus with the upper Linth, Uri with the Reuss, Graubuenden with the upper Rhine, to which is joined by many pass routes the sparsely peopled Engadine, Ticino with the drainage basin of upper Lake Maggiore, Unterwalden with the southern drainage valleys of Lake Lucerne. Where the mountains are lower, or where passes connect valleys of high levels, cantonal boundaries may overstep geographical barriers. A commune generally consists of the villages strung along a narrow lateral valley, isolated and sufficient unto itself politically. A close parallel to the Alpine commune is found among the Kabyles of the Atlas Mountains. Their political structure is based upon the Jemaa or commune, a small sovereign republic whose independence is fiercely defended. It enjoys complete local autonomy, is governed by an assembly of all the adult male inhabitants, and grants this body the usual functions except the administration of justice, which, characteristically, is replaced by blood feuds as the inalienable right of the individual. Romans, Arabs, Turks and French have in turn exercised over these mountain Berbers only nominal control, except when their internal dissensions made them vulnerable.[1386]

[Sidenote: Significance of their small size.]

The mountains, by the segregating power of their ridges and ranges, first produce these little independent communities, and then, throwing around them strong protecting arms, enfold them in an embrace which long provides security to them in their weakness. These minute mountain states, therefore, tend to reflect in their size the isolation of their environment, and indirectly the weakness of the surrounding nations. The original Swiss Eidgenossensschaft of the four forest cantons, embedded in the high Alps, braced against a mountain wall, held its own against the feeble feudal states of Austria and Germany. The rugged relief of Graubuenden and the spirit of freedom cradled there enabled its peasants in the Middle Ages to overthrow the feudal lords, and to establish a federal republic. This typical mountain state was a league composed of three other leagues. Each component league consisted of a group of districts, having the power of sovereign states, and consisting in turn of a group of communes, which were quite independent in local affairs. This triune league formed in time an alliance with the Swiss Confederation, but did not become a member of it till the Vienna adjustment of 1815. Similar is the story of the mountain shepherds of Appenzell, who formed a little peasant republic, despite their bishop overlord of St. Gall; and who later during the Reformation, on the ground of religious differences, divided into two yet smaller states.[1387] The relation between size and inaccessibility is most strikingly illustrated in the high Himalayan ranges west of Kashmir and north of the Punjab. Here is the Shinaka district, which includes the Chilas, Darel, Tanger and other valleys branching off from the Indus, and which is inhabited by Dards of Indo-European stock. Each Shinaka valley is a small cantonal republic, and each village of each republic is a commune managing its own affairs by an assembly. One settlement of only twelve houses enjoys complete autonomy. Besides the village assemblies there is a state parliament handling questions of general policy, to which each village sends representatives. One dissentient vote can defeat a measure. The majority cannot control the minority; for if one village of a state disagrees with the others, it is free to carry out its own policy, even in the matter of foreign alliances.[1388] Here is home rule run to seed.

[Sidenote: Slight power of mountain chiefs.]

Small size is sometimes coupled with monarchical rule, degenerating occasionally into despotism among aggressive robber tribes. The inaccessible Hunza Valley is occupied on opposite sides of its deep gorge by two rival states, the Hunzas and the Nagaris, whose combined population amounts to scarcely 25,000 souls. Hostile to each other, they unite only to resist an invading force. While the Hunza Thum is a tyrant, the Nagari ruler has little voice in the government. The Tibeto-Burman hill folk of the eastern Himalayas are divided into clans, and concede a mild authority to a chief who rules a group of clan villages, but only rarely is able to secure power over a larger district. The Khasia Hills of Assam are broken up into twenty-three petty states, each under its own Rajah or chief, who has, however, little authority beyond the administration of justice.[1389]

Everywhere in mountain regions appears this repugnance to centralized authority. Protection by environment obviates the necessity of protection through combination. The spirit of clan exclusiveness, the absence of a common national sentiment, characterize equally the tribesmen of mountainous Albania, of Persian Luristan,[1390] and highland Kurdistan. Along the rugged upheaved area which forms the western boundary of India from the Khaibar Pass to the sea, British officials have had to negotiate with the native Pathan and Baluch "jirgahs," assemblies of the chief men of the countless clans into which the tribes are divided, as the only visible form of authority tolerated.[1391] Combination must be voluntary and of a type to exact a modicum of submission. These requirements are best answered by the confederation, which may gradually assume a stable and elaborate form among an advanced people like the Swiss; or it may constitute a loose yet effective union, as in the famous Samnite confederacy of the central Apennines; or a temporary league like that of the ancient Arcadians, or the group of confederated sheiks of Bellad el Kobail, the "Country of the Highlanders" in mountainous Yemen, who in 1790 established a republican form of union for defense against their more powerful neighbors.[1392]

[Sidenote: Mountain isolation and differentiation.]

The power of mountains to protect makes them asylums of refuge for displaced peoples. This fact explains the confused ethnology which often characterizes these isolated regions, especially when they lie near or across natural highways of human migration. As a tide of humanity sweeps around or across the mountains, a branch stream turns into a side valley, where it is caught and held. There it remains unaltered, crystallizing in its seclusion, subjected for ages to few modifying influences from without. Its people keep their own language and customs, little affected by a totally different race stock similarly placed in a neighboring alcove of the mountains. Lack of communication engenders an endless multiplication of dialects, as we find them in the Alps, the Caucasus, in Kafirstan of the Hindu Kush and in Nepal. Diversity of speech, itself a product of isolation, reacts upon that political and social aloofness of mountain folk, to emphasize and fix it.

[Sidenote: Survival of primitive races in mountains.]

From this principle it follows that the same highland region shows strong differentiation and marked social individuality from one district to another, and from one valley to the next, despite a prevailing similarity of local geographic conditions. In fact, the very similarity of those conditions, strong in their power to isolate, present the conditions for inevitable variation. A mountain region gets its population from diverse sources, or, which is quite as important, at different times from the same source. For instance, Nepal received contingents of Rajput conquerors, dislodged from the Punjab, in the seventh century, the eleventh, and finally the dominant Gurkhas at the end of the eighteenth. To-day these represent different degrees of amalgamation with the local Tibetan stock of Nepal. They are distinguished from each other by a diversity of languages, and a multiplicity of dialects, while the whole piedmont of the country shows a yet different blend with the Aryan Hindus of the Ganges valley, who have seeped into the Terai and been drawn up, as if by capillary attraction, into the hill valleys of the outer range. The Vindhyan Range and its associated highlands, long before the dawn of Indian history, caught and held in their careful embrace some of the fragile aboriginal tribes like the Kolarian Ho, Santals and Korkus. Centuries later the Dravidian Bhils and Gonds sought refuge here before the advancing Indo-Aryans, and found asylums in the secluded valleys.[1393] Finally those same northern plains whence the Dravidians had come, after the Mohammedan conquest of central India in the sixteenth century, sent flying to the refuge of the hills a large contingent of Hindus of mingled Dravidian and Aryan stocks, but stamped with the culture of the Ganges basin. These occupied the richer valleys and the more accessible plateaus of the highlands, driving the primitive Gonds and Bhils back into the remoter recesses of the mountains.[1394] Dravidians and aboriginal Kolarians survive in their purity in the wilder and more inaccessible regions, but in the lower valleys their upper classes show signs of mixtures with the Rajput invaders, while the lower classes betray little Aryan blood.[1395]

[Sidenote: Diversity of peoples and dialects.]

Afghanistan, of disordered relief, set as a transit region between the plains of Mesopotamia, the Oxus and the Indus, has a confused ethnology in keeping with the tangle of dissected plateaus and mountain systems which constitute its surface. Here we find three distinct branches of the Indo-European race, divided up into various peoples of diverse tongues and subdivided further into countless tribes; and two branches of Mongol-Tartars scattered, as if out of a pepper box, from the Helmund to the Oxus, tossed in among diverse peoples of Iranic and Galcha origin in hopeless confusion. The various Afghan tribes, separated from each other by natural barriers and intervening alien stocks, though similar in physical type, speech, religion and culture, have no sense of unity, no common political aims, while the appalling list of tribes constituting the population of the country[1396] offers little hope of Afghanistan ever developing national cohesion. Kafiristan alone, which lies in the Hindu Kush range for the most part at an altitude of 12,000 feet or more, harbors in its recesses many remnants of primitive peoples, speaking various languages and dialects, strangers alike to any native affinity or political union. It is a mere agglomeration of ethnic fragments, in which the people of one village are often unable to converse with those of the next.[1397] Relief has fashioned the ethnology of the Caucasus in the same way. No other equally small area in the world contains such a variety of peoples and tongues, differing from one another in race, language, and customs so fundamentally as the Caucasus. From the heterogeneous survivals of extremely old ethnic stocks, lodged in the high valleys, to the intrusive Russians of the lower piedmont, the Caucasus might be called an ethnographical sample card.[1398]

The rugged configuration of the Alps, from the Rhone to the Danube, has preserved the broad-headed Alpine race, which was perhaps the primitive stock of Central Europe. The great river valleys leading into this massive highland, like the Rhine, Aar, Inn and Adige, show the intrusion of a long-headed race from both north and south; but lofty and remote valleys off the main routes of travel, like the Hither Rhine about Dissentis, the little Stanzerthal of the upper Inn, and the Passierthal of the upper Adige above Meran, show the race preserved in its purity by the isolating environment.[1399] Here each segregated lateral valley becomes an area of marked linguistic and social differentiation; only where it opens into the wider longitudinal valleys are its peculiarities of speech and custom diluted by the intrusive current of another race. Switzerland has received three different streams of language, and broken them up into numerous rivulets of dialect. On its small area of 16,125 square miles (41,346 square kilometers) thirty-five dialects of German are spoken, sixteen of French, eight of Italian and five of Romansch, a primitive and degenerate Latin tongue, surviving from the ancestral days of Roman occupation.[1400] The yet smaller territory of the Tyrol has all these languages except French, whose place is taken by various forms of Slavonic speech, which have entered by the western tributaries of the Danube.[1401]

[Sidenote: Constriction of mountain areas of ethnic survivals.]

Rarely is a polyglot mountain population able to work out its own political salvation, as the Swiss have done. More often political union must be forced upon them from without. Oftener still, when the highlanders are primitive survivals, ill-matched against the superior invaders from the plain, they are doomed to a process of constriction of territory and deterioration of numbers, which proceeds slowly or rapidly according to the inaccessibility of their environment and the energy of the intruders. Deliberate, unenterprising nations, like the Chinese, Turks and Indo-Aryans long tolerate the presence of alien mountain tribes, who remain like enemies brought to bay in their isolated fortresses. The conquerors throw around them at their leisure a cordon of settlement, which, slowly ascending the piedmont, draws closer and closer about the mountaineers. The situation of many mountain tribes reminds one of a besieged stronghold. Russian wars against the Caucasus have rightly been described as protracted sieges. The heroic history of Switzerland in relation to its neighbors has been that of a skillfully conducted defense, both military and diplomatic. The territory of China is dotted over with detached groups of aborigines, who have survived wherever a friendly mountain has offered them an asylum. Variously known as Lolos, Mantze or Miaotse, they have preserved everywhere a semi-independence in pathless mountains, whither Chinese troops do not dare to follow them;[1402] but the more numerous and patient Chinese agriculturalists are in many sections slowly encroaching upon their territories, driving them farther and farther into the recesses of their highlands. The same process goes on in Formosa, where the Chinese have gradually forced the native Malays into mountain fastnesses among the peaks which rise to 14,000 feet (4500 meters). There, split up by internecine feuds into numberless clans and tribes, ignorant of one another's languages, raiding each other's territories and the coastal plains tilled by Chinese colonists, they await their doom, while the piedmont zone between has already given birth to a typical border race of halfbreeds, more Chinese than Malay.[1403]

[Sidenote: Isolation and retardation of mountain regions.]

"To have and to hold" is the motto of the mountains. Like remote islands, they are often museums of social antiquities. Antiquated races and languages abound. The mountaineers of the Southern Appalachians speak to-day an eighteenth century English. Their literature is the ballad poetry of old England and Scotland, handed down from parent to child. Clan feuds settle questions of justice, as in the Caucasus and the Apennines. Religion is orthodox to the last degree, sectarianism is rigid, and Joshua's power over the sun remains in some lonely valleys undiscounted.[1404] These are all the marks of isolation and retardation which appear in similar environments elsewhere. Especially religious dogmas tend to show in mountains a tenacity of life impossible in the plains. The Kafirs, inhabiting the high Hindu Kush Mountains of Badakshan, and apparently of Pelasgic, early Greek, or Persian origin, have a religion blended of paganism, Zoroastrianism and Brahmanism.[1405] One intruding faith has been unable to dislodge the previous incumbent, so the three have combined. The great historical destiny of the small, barren, isolated Judean plateau was to hold aloof the chaste religion of the desert-bred Jews from the sensuous agricultural gods of the Canaanites; to conserve and fix it; if need be, to narrow it to a provincial tribal faith, to stamp it with exclusiveness, conservatism, and formalism, as its adherents with bigotry,[1406] for this is always the effect of geographical seclusion. But when all these limitations of Judaism are acknowledged, the fact remains that that segregated mountain environment performed the inestimable service for the world of keeping pure and undefiled the first and last great gift of the desert, a monotheistic faith.