Buddhism, once the official religion of Korea but disestablished three centuries ago, has taken refuge in the Diamond Mountains, far from the main roads; there a dull, moribund form of the faith dozes on in the monasteries and monastic shrines of these secluded highlands.[1407] Driven out of India, Buddhism survives only in the Himalayan border of the country among the local Tibeto-Burman peoples, and in Ceylon, whose mountain city of Kandy is its stronghold. The persecuted Waldenses, a heretic sect who fled in 1178 from the cities of France to the Alps, took refuge in the remote valleys of the Pellice, Chisone, and Augrogne some thirty miles southwest of Turin. There, protected equally against attack and modification, the Waldenses have maintained the old tenets and organization of their religion.[1408]

[Sidenote: Conservatism of mountain peoples.]

The mountain-dweller is essentially conservative. There is little in his environment to stimulate him to change, and little reaches him from the outside world. The "spirit of the times" is generally the spirit of a past time, when it has penetrated to his remote upland. He is strangely indifferent to what goes on in the great outstretched plains below him. What filters in to him from the outside has little suggestion for him, because it does not accord with the established order which he has always known. Hence innovation is distasteful to him. This repugnance to change reaches its clearest expression, perhaps, in the development and preservation of national costumes. Tracht, which is crystallized style in dress, appears nowhere so widespread and so abundantly differentiated as in mountain districts. In Switzerland, every canton has its distinctive costume which has come down from a remote past. The peasants of Norway, of the German and Austrian Alps, of the Basque settlements in the Pyrenees, of mountain-bound Alsace and Bohemia, give local color to the landscape by the picturesqueness of their national dress.

[Sidenote: Mental and moral qualities.]

With this conservatism of the mountaineer is generally coupled suspicion toward strangers, extreme sensitiveness to criticism, superstition, strong religious feeling, and an intense love of home and family. The bitter struggle for existence makes him industrious, frugal, provident; and, when the marauding stage has been outgrown, he is peculiarly honest as a rule. Statistics of crime in mountain regions show few crimes against property though many against person. When the mountain-bred man comes down into the plains, he brings with him therefore certain qualities which make him a formidable competitor in the struggle for existence,—the strong muscles, unjaded nerves, iron purpose, and indifference to luxury bred in him by the hard conditions of his native environment.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XVI

[1253] Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, p. 218. Leipzig, 1897.

[1254] For full discussion, see H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 79-81. New York, 1902.

[1255] J. Thomson, Through Masai Land, pp. 78-82, 113-115, 122, 140-141, 163-167, 406-407. London, 1885.

[1256] J. Russell Smith, Plateaus in Tropical America, in Report of Eighth International Geographical Congress, pp. 829-831. Washington, 1905.

[1257] Isaiah Bowman, The Distribution of Population in Bolivia, Bulletin American Geographical Society, pp. 74-78, Vol. VII. 1909.

[1258] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 157. London, 1902.

[1259] Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 52-56. New York, 1895. C.C. Royce, The Cherokee Nation of Indians, Fifth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 140-143. Washington, 1887.

[1260] W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 253-254. New York, 1899.

[1261] G.L. Gomme, The Village Community, pp. 72, 75-95. New York, 1890.

[1262] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 148, 154, 155. New York, 1902.

[1263] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 204, 207. London, 1903.

[1264] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 304. New York, 1902.

[1265] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 221. London, 1903.

[1266] Alfred Stead, Japan by the Japanese, p. 425. London, 1904. Henry Dyer, Dai Nippon, p. 241. New York, 1904.

[1267] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 307-308. Phila., 1891.

[1268] Wilhelm Deecke, Italy, pp. 190, 358-361. London, 1904.

[1269] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. I, p. 284. New York, 1882.

[1270] S.P. Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Spain, Vol. III, pp. 610-613. Philadelphia, 1904.

[1271] M. Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia, Vol. I, pp. 290-291, 300. Edinburgh, 1792. S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, pp. 57, 68, 69, 415. New York, 1900.

[1272] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 75, 140, 267. London, 1902.

[1273] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 10. London, 1897.

[1274] Ibid., pp. 312, 460, 463, 468, 475.

[1275] Ibid., 118, 119, 160, 200.

[1276] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp. 176, 183, 294; Vol. II, p. 107. New York and London, 1900.

[1277] F.H., Nichols, Through Hidden Shensi, pp. 51, 54. New York, 1902.

[1278] E.J. Payne, History of the New World, Vol. I, pp. 375-378. Oxford, 1892.

[1279] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 162. London, 1896-1898.

[1280] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 86-87. London, 1897.

[1281] A.B. Ellis, West African Islands, p. 248. London, 1885.

[1282] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 254. London, 1896-1898.

[1283] Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 426-428.

[1284] A.E. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, p. 122. New York, 1869.

[1285] Ibid., 174.

[1286] W.E. Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Vol. I, p. 90. New York, 1903.

[1287] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 458, 541, 543; and Vol. IV, pp. 88-89. Washington, 1905. Gazetteer of the Philippine Islands, photographs, pp. 352-353. Washington, 1902.

[1288] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 96-97. London, 1907.

[1289] V.L. Cameron, Across Africa, p. 221. London, 1885.

[1290] Count Gleichen, The Egyptian Sudan, Vol. I, p. 190. London, 1905.

[1291] Prescott, Conquest of Peru, Vol. I, pp. 134-136. New York, 1848.

[1292] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 176. London, 1896-1898.

[1293] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 176.

[1294] E.J. Payne, History of the New World, Vol. I, p. 377. Oxford, 1892.

[1295] Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol. II, p. 346. London, 1812.

[1296] B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 57, 58, 61. London, 1896.

[1297] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 148, 151, 154, 163, 203, 238 et passim. London, 1897.

[1298] Ibid., 70-73.

[1299] F.H. Nichols, Through Hidden Shensi, p. 52. New York, 1902.

[1300] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp. 163, 176; Vol. II, pp. 126, 147. New York and London, 1900.

[1301] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, p. 307. Philadelphia, 1891.

[1302] Wilhelm Roscher, National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 656, Note 1. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1303] Norway, Official Publication, p. 307. Christiania, 1900.

[1304] Roscher, National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 656, Note 4. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1305] Norway, Official Publication, p. 325. Christiania, 1900.

[1306] Roscher, National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 657, Note 7. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1307] Ibid., p. 655, Note 1.

[1308] Norway, Official Publication, p. 310. Christiania, 1900.

[1309] B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 58-59. London, 1896.

[1310] McCullough, Geographical Dictionary, Article Nepal. J.O. White, Journeys in Bhutan, Geographical Journal, Vol. 35, p. 33. London, 1910.

[1311] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 10. London, 1897.

[1312] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, p. 310. Philadelphia, 1891. A. von Miaskowski, Die schweizerische Allmend, pp. 88-89, 155, 178, 179, 198. Staats- und socialwissenschaftliche Forschungen, Vol. II, No. 4, Leipzig, 1879.

[1313] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 98, 248, 329. London, 1897.

[1314] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp. 181, 187, 224. London and New York, 1900.

[1315] Carter Harrison, A Race with the Sun, p. 63. New York, 1889.

[1316] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 325-327. Phila. 1891.

[1317] A von Miaskowski, Die schweizerische Allmend, pp. 164-166. Staats- und socialwissenschaftliche Forschungen, Vol. II, No. 4. Leipzig, 1879.

[1318] Norway, Official Publication, p. 325. Christiania, 1900.

[1319] Ibid., p. 59.

[1320] Roscher, National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 655, Note 1. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1321] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 40, 41, 77. London, 1897.

[1322] M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China in 1846, Vol. II, pp. 151-156. Chicago, 1898.

[1323] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 228. New York, 1891.

[1324] Perceval Landon, The Opening of Tibet, pp. 110, 111, 205-206. New York, 1905.

[1325] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 197, 248. London, 1903.

[1326] Wilhelm Deecke, Italy, p. 220. London, 1904.

[1327] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 269-270. London, 1903.

[1328] Malthus, Essay on Population, Book II, chap. V.

[1329] Cliffe Leslie, Auvergne, Fortnightly Review, p. 741, Vol. XVI. 1874.

[1330] Wilhelm Deecke, Italy, pp. 243, 409. London, 1904.

[1331] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 252. London, 1896-1898.

[1332] L. Higgin, Spanish Life in Town and Country, pp. 27, 29, 292-293. New York, 1902.

[1333] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 350. New York, 1897.

[1334] Von Bremer, Land of the Battaks, Geographical Journal, Vol. VII, pp. 76-80. London, 1896.

[1335] B. Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 229-232. Phila., 1891.

[1336] James Logan, The Scottish Gael or Celtic Manners, p. 78. Hartford, 1849.

[1337] Indian Census for 1901, Vol. I, Part I, p. 93, by Risley and Gait. Calcutta, 1903.

[1338] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. I, p. 219. New York, 1882.

[1339] Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, p, 228. Leipzig, 1897.

[1340] Archibald Little, The Far East, pp. 47, 167. Oxford, 1905.

[1341] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 243. New York, 1902.

[1342] Malthus, Essay on Population, Book II, chap. I.

[1343] Cliffe Leslie, Auvergne, Fortnightly Review, Vol. XVI, pp. 741-742. 1874.

[1344] Oscar P. Crosby, Tibet and Turkestan, pp. 153, 156. London and New York, 1905. A. Little, The Far East, p. 217. Oxford, 1905.

[1345] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 227. New York, 1891.

[1346] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 218. London, 1897.

[1347] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 212. New York, 1891.

[1348] G.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, p. 188. London, 1906.

[1349] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, pp. 451, 452. London, 1891.

[1350] Strabo, Book XVI, chap. IV, 25.

[1351] For authorities, see Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, pp. 452-455. London, 1891. McLennan, Primitive Marriage, pp. 178-179, 184-189. Edinburgh, 1865. G.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, pp. 14, 15, 88-89, 177, 305. London, 1906.

[1352] Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. 1, pp. 646-649. New York, 1887.

[1353] W.H.R. Rivers, The Todas, incorporated in W. I. Thomas' Source Book for Social Origins, pp. 485-486. Chicago, 1909.

[1354] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 463. London, 1891.

[1355] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 216, 217. London, 1905.

[1356] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, pp. 211-212. New York, 1891.

[1357] Oscar P. Crosby, Tibet and Turkestan, pp. 148-151. New York and London, 1905.

[1358] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, pp. 470-483, 547-548. London, 1891.

[1359] Perceval Landon, The Opening of Tibet, p. 193. New York, 1905.

[1360] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 137-141. London, 1897.

[1361] Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 6, 7, 8, 10.

[1362] Ibid., Book III, chap. III, 5, 7, 8.

[1363] Ibid, Book VII, chap. VI, 1.

[1364] Ibid, Book XI, chap. XII, 4; chap. XIII, 3, 6.

[1365] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 346-349, 460-464. London, 1897.

[1366] Ibid, 280-282.

[1367] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 33. London, 1905.

[1368] Ibid, 219-221.

[1369] Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol. I, pp. 386-390, 406-407. London, 1812.

[1370] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 246-249. London, 1902.

[1371] M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China in 1846, Vol. II, pp. 90-93, 100-101, 129-132. Chicago, 1898.

[1372] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 131, 133-135. New York and London, 1902-1906.

[1373] Strabo, Book V, chap. IV, II.

[1374] Article Nepal, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

[1375] C. Keller, Madagascar, pp. 24-26, 72, 85. London, 1901.

[1376] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 280, 288-289. London, 1897.

[1377] Walter K. Kelly, History of Russia, Vol. II, p. 392. London, 1881.

[1378] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. II, p. 441. New York, 1859.

[1379] Ibid., Vol. X, pp. 208, 215, 224-225.

[1380] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 235. London, 1902.

[1381] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. II, pp. 125, 136-137. New York, 1871.

[1382] W.K. Kelly, History of Russia, Vol. II, p. 394. London, 1881.

[1383] Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol. I, pp. 391, 404-405. London, 1812.

[1384] H. Spencer, A Visit to Andorra, Fortnightly Review, Vol. 67, pp. 53-60. 1897.

[1385] Article Tyrol, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

[1386] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 253-254. London, 1896-1898.

[1387] H.J. Mackinder, The Rhine, pp. 27-31, 47-49, 56, 57. London, 1908.

[1388] E.P. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 305-306. London, 1897.

[1389] B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 136, 143-146. London, 1896.

[1390] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 229-231, 248, 252-253. London, 1902.

[1391] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 243-244. London, 1905.

[1392] Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia, Vol. II, pp. 50-51. Edinburgh, 1792.

[1393] B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 40, 47, 110, 121, 151-154, 159. London, 1896.

[1394] Captain J. Forsythe, The Highlands of Central India, pp. 10-15, 23-24, 123-125. London, 1889.

[1395] Ibid., 6, 7, 10-12, 141-147.

[1396] Angus Hamilton, Afghanistan, pp. 262-268. New York, 1906.

[1397] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 98-99. London, 1905.

[1398] Merzbacher, Aus den Hochregionen des Kaukasus, Vol. I, pp. 55-56, 156. Leipzig, 1901.

[1399] W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 281-283, 289-290, map p. 285. New York, 1899.

[1400] Ibid., 282.

[1401] Article Tyrol, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

[1402] Archibald Little, The Far East, 131-132. Oxford, 1905. Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, 132-133, 146-147, 166, 174, 207-210. New York and London, 1900. S. Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom, Vol. I, p. 43, New York, 1904. J. Naken, Die Provinz Kwangtung und ihre Bevoelkerung, Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen, Vol. 24, p. 421. 1878.

[1403] Archibald Little, The Far East, pp. 307-308. Oxford, 1905.

[1404] E.C. Semple, The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains, Geographical Journal, Vol. XVII, pp. 588-623. London, 1901.

[1405] Sir Thomas Holdich, The Origin of the Kafir of the Hindu Kush, Geographical Journal, Vol. VII, p. 42. London, 1896.

[1406] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 259-261. New York, 1897.

[1407] Isabella Bird Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbors, pp. 21, 134-135, 140, 142. New York, 1897.

[1408] Article Waldenses, Encyclopaedia Britannica.



CHAPTER XVII

THE INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE

[Sidenote: Importance of climatic influences.]

Climate enters fundamentally into all consideration of geographic influences, either by implication or explicitly. It is a factor in most physiological and psychological effects of environment. It underlies the whole significance of zonal location, continental and insular. Large territorial areas are favorable to improved variation in men and animals partly because they comprise a diversity of natural conditions, of which a wide range of climates forms one. This is also one advantage of a varied relief, especially in the Tropics, where all the zones may be compressed into a small area on the slopes of high mountains like the Andes and Kilimanjaro. Climate fixes the boundaries of human habitation in Arctic latitudes and high altitudes by drawing the dead-line to all organic life. It dominates life in steppes and torrid deserts as in sub-polar wastes. It encourages intimacy with the sea in tropical Malays and Polynesians, and like a slave-driver, scourges on the fur-clad Eskimo to reap the harvest of the deep. It is always present in that intricate balance of geographic factors which produces a given historical result, throwing its weight now into one side of the scales, now into the other. It underlies the production, distribution and exchange of commodities derived from the vegetable and animal kingdoms, influences methods of agriculture, and the efficiency of human labor in various industries.[1409] Hence it is a potent factor in the beginning and in the evolution of civilization, so far as this goes hand in hand with economic development.

[Sidenote: Climate in the interplay of geographic factors.]

The foregoing chapters have therefore been indirectly concerned with climate to no small degree, but they have endeavored to treat the subject analytically, showing climate as working with or against or in some combination with other geographic factors. This course was necessary, because climatic influences are so conspicuous and so important that by the older geographers like Montesquieu[1410] and others, they have been erected into a blanket theory, and made to explain a wide range of social and historical phenomena which were properly the effect of other geographic factors.

[Sidenote: Direct and indirect effects of climate.]

For a clear understanding of climatic influences, it is necessary to adhere to the chief characteristics of the atmosphere, such as heat and cold, moisture and aridity, and to consider the effect of zonal location, winds and relief in the production and distribution of these; also to distinguish between direct and indirect results of climate, temporary and permanent, physiological and psychological ones, because the confusion of these various effects breeds far-fetched conclusions. The direct modification of man by climate is partly an a priori assumption, because the incontestable evidences of such modification are not very numerous, however strong the probability may be. The effect of climate upon plant and animal life is obvious, and immediately raises the assumption that man has been similarly influenced. But there is this difference: in contrast to the helpless dependence upon environment of stationary plants and animals, whose range of movement is strictly determined by conditions of food and temperature, the great mobility of man, combined with his inventiveness, enables him to flee or seek almost any climatic condition, and to emancipate himself from the full tyranny of climatic control by substituting an indirect economic effect for a direct physical effect.

The direct results of climate are various, though some are open to the charge of imperfect proof. Even the relation of nigrescence to tropical heat, which seems to be established by the geographical distribution of negroid races in the Old World, fails to find support from the facts of pigmentation among the American Indians from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Nevertheless climate undoubtedly modifies many physiological processes in individuals and peoples,[1411] affects their immunity from certain classes of diseases and their susceptibility to others, influences their temperament, their energy, their capacity for sustained or for merely intermittent effort, and therefore helps determine their efficiency as economic and political agents.

While producing these direct effects, climate also influences man indirectly by controlling the wide range of his life conditions dependent upon the plant and animal life about him. It dictates what crops he may raise, and has it in its power to affect radically the size of his harvest. It decides which flocks and herds are best suited to his environment, and therefore directs his pastoral activities, whether he keeps reindeer, camels, llamas, horses or horned cattle. By interdicting both agriculture and stock-raising, as in Greenland whose ice cap leaves little surface free even for reindeer moss, it condemns the inhabitants forever to the uncertain subsistence of the hunter. Where it encourages the growth of large forests which harbor abundant game and yield abundant fruits, as in the hot, moist equatorial belt and on rainy mountain slopes, it prolongs the hunter stage of development, retards the advance to agriculture. Climate thus helps to influence the rate and the limit of cultural development. It determines in part the local supply of raw material with which man has to work, and hence the majority of his secondary activities, except where these are expended on mineral resources. It decides the character of his food, clothing, and dwelling, and ultimately of his civilization.

[Sidenote: Effect of climate upon relief.]

The very ground under man's feet, moreover, feels the molding hand of climate. In one region a former age of excessive cold has glaciated the surface and scoured off the fertile loam down to the underlying rock, or left the land coated with barren glacial drift or more productive clays. In another, the cold still persists and caps the land with ice and snow, or, as in the tundra, underlays it with a stratum of frozen earth, which keeps the surface wet and chilled even in the height of summer. In yet other regions, abundant moisture combined with heat covers the ground with a pad of fertile humus, while some hundred miles away drying trade winds parch and crack the steppe vegetation, convert most of its organic substance into gases, and leave only a small residue to enrich the soil. Rain itself modifies the relief of the land, and therefore often decides in a slow, cosmic way what shall be the ultimate destination of its precious store of water. A heavy precipitation on the windward side of a mountain range, by increasing the mechanical force of its drainage streams, makes them bite their way back into the heart of the system and decapitate the rivers on the leeward side, thus diminishing the volume of water left to irrigate the rainless slope. Thus the hydra-headed Amazon has been spreading and multiplying its sources among the Andean valleys, to the detriment of agriculture on the dry Pacific slope; thus the torrents of the Western Ghats, gorged by the monsoon rains from the Indian Ocean, are slowly nipping off the streams of the ill-watered Deccan, [See map page 484.] All these direct and indirect effects of climate may combine to produce ultimate politico-geographical results which manifest themselves in the expansion, power and permanence of states.

[Sidenote: Climate limits the habitable area.]

Climatic conditions limit the habitable area of the earth. This is their most important anthropo-geographic effect. At either pole lurks an invincible foe, with whom expanding humanity must always reckon, and who brooks little encroachment upon his territory. His weapon is the restriction of organic life, without which man cannot exist. The geographical boundaries of organic life, however, are wider than those of human life. The consequence of this climatic control, therefore, is not only a narrowed distribution of the human race, but a concentration which intensifies the struggle for existence, forces the utilization of all the available area, and thereby in every locality stimulates adaptation to environment.

[Sidenote: Adaptability of man to climatic extremes.]

Man ranks among the most adaptable organic beings on the earth. No climate is absolutely intolerable to him. Only the absence of food supply or of all marketable commodities will exclude him from the most inhospitable region. His dwellings are found from sea level up to an altitude of 5000 meters or more, where the air pressure is little over one half that on the coast.[1412] Seventeen per cent. of the towns and cities of Bolivia are located at an elevation above 13,000 feet (4000 meters), while Aullagas occupies a site 15,700 feet or nearly 5000 meters above the sea.[1413] Mineral wealth explains these high Bolivian settlements, just as it draws the Mexican sulphur miners to temporary residence in the crater of Popocatepetl at an altitude of 17,787 feet (5420 meters), from their permanent dwellings a thousand meters below.[1414] The laborers employed in the construction of the Oroya railroad in Peru became rapidly accustomed to work in the rarefied air at an elevation of 4000 to 4800 meters. The trade routes over the Andes and Himalayan ranges often cross passes at similar altitudes; the Karakorum road mounts to 18,548 feet (5,650 meters). Yet these great elevations do not prevent men going their way and doing the day's work, although the unacclimated tenderfoot is liable to attacks of mountain sickness in consequence of the rarefied air.[1415]

Man makes himself at home in any zone. The cold pole of the earth, so far as recorded temperatures show, is the town of Verkhoyansk in northeastern Siberia, whose mean January temperature is 54 F. below zero (-48 Centigrade). Massawa, one of the hottest spots in the furnace of Africa is the capital of the Italian colony of Eritrea. However, extremes both of heat and cold reduce the density of population, the scale and efficiency of economic enterprises. The greatest events of universal history and especially the greatest historical developments belong to the North Temperate Zone. The decisive voyages of discovery emanated thence, though the needs of trade and the steady winds of low latitudes combined to carry them to the Tropics. The coldest lands of the earth are either uninhabited, like Spitzenbergen, or sparsely populated, like northern Siberia. The hottest regions, also, are far from being so densely populated as many temperate countries.[1416] [See maps pages 8, 9, and 612.] The fact that they are for the most part dependencies or former colonial possessions of European powers indicates their retarded economic and political development. The contrast between the Mongol Tunguse, who lead the life of hunters and herders in Arctic Siberia, and the related Manchus, who conquered and rule the temperate lands of China, shows how climates help differentiate various branches of the same ethnic stock; and this contrast only parallels that between the Eskimo and Aztec offshoots of the American Indians, the Norwegian and Italian divisions of the white race.

0 deg.C = 32 deg.F. 20 deg.C = 68 deg.F. 30 deg.C = 86 deg.F.]

[Sidenote: Temperature as modified by oceans and winds.]

The zonal location of a country indicates roughly the degree of heat which it receives from the sun. It would do this accurately if variations of relief, prevailing winds and proximity of the oceans did not enter as disturbing factors. Since water heats and cools more slowly than the land, the ocean is a great reservoir of warmth in winter and of cold in summer, and exercises therefore an equalizing effect upon the temperature of the adjacent continents, far as these effects can be carried by the wind. The ocean is also the great source of moisture, and this, too, it distributes over the land through the agency of the wind. Where warm ocean currents, like the Gulf Stream and Kuro Siwa, penetrate into temperate or sub-polar latitudes, or where cool ones, like the Peruvian and Benguela Currents wash the coasts of tropical regions, they enhance the power of the ocean and wind to mitigate the extremes of temperature on land. The warm currents, moreover, loading the air above them with vapor, provide a store of rain to the nearest wind-swept land. Hence both the rainfall and temperature of a given country depend largely upon its neighboring water and air currents, and its accessibility to the rain-bearing winds. If it occupies a marked central position in temperate latitudes, like eastern Russia or the Great Plains of our semi-arid West, it receives limited moisture and suffers the extreme temperatures of a typical continental climate. The same result follows if it holds a distinctly peripheral location, and yet lies in the rain-shadow of a mountain barrier, like western Peru, Patagonia and Sweden north of the sixtieth parallel. [See map page 484.]

[Sidenote: Effect of the westerlies.]

Owing to the prevalence of westerly winds in the Temperate Zones and particularly in the North Temperate Zone, the mean annual temperature is high on the western face of the northern continents, but drops rapidly toward the east.[1417] This is especially true of winter temperatures, which even near the eastern coast show the severity of a continental climate. Sitka and New York, Trondhjem and Peking have the same mean January temperatures, though Peking lies in about the latitude of Madrid, over twenty-three degrees farther south.

Europe's location in the path of the North Atlantic westerlies, swept by winds from a small and narrow ocean which has been super-heated by the powerful Gulf Stream, secures for that continent a more equable climate and milder winters than corresponding latitudes on the western coasts of North America, whose winds from the wide Pacific are not so warm.[1418] Moreover, a coastal rampart of mountains from Alaska to Mexico restricts the beneficial influences of the Pacific climate to a narrow seaboard, excludes them from the vast interior, which by reason of cold or aridity or both must forever renounce great economic or historical significance, unless its mineral resources developed unsuspected importance. In Europe, the absence of mountain barriers across the course of these westerly winds from Norway to central Spain, and the unobstructed avenue offered to them by the Mediterranean Sea during fall and winter, enable all the Atlantic's mitigating influences of warmth and moisture to penetrate inland, and temper the climate of Europe as far east as St. Petersburg and Constantinople. Thus several factors have combined to give the western half of Europe an extraordinarily favorable climate. They have therefore greatly broadened its zone of historical intensity toward the north, pushed it up to the sixtieth parallel, while the corresponding zone in eastern Asia finds its northern limit at the fortieth degree.

[Sidenote: Rainfall.]

Moisture and warmth are essential to all that life upon which human existence depends. Hence temperature and rainfall are together the most important natural assets of a country, because of their influence upon its productivity. The grazing capacity and wheat yield of southern Australia increase almost regularly with every added inch of rainfall.[1419] The map of population for the Empire of India clearly shows that a high degree of density accompanies a high and certain rainfall. Exceptions occur only where hilly or mountainous tracts offer scant arable areas, or where plains and valleys are sparsely populated owing to political troubles or unhealthiness. Nearly three-tenths of the population are found crowded together on the one-tenth of India's level territory which is blessed with a rainfall above the average for the country.[1420] Deserts which yield nothing are purely climatic phenomena. Steppes which facilitate the historical movement, and forests which block it, are products of scant or ample precipitation. The zonal distribution of rainfall, with its maxima in the Tropics and the Temperate Zones, and its minima in the trade-wind belts and polar regions, reinforces and emphasizes the influence of temperature in determining certain great cultural and economic zones.

In equatorial regions, which have an abundant rainfall throughout the year, agriculture is directed toward fruits and roots; only in certain districts can it include cereals, and then only rice and maize. The temperate grains demand some dry summer weeks for their maturity. Excessive moisture in Ireland has practically excluded wheat-growing, which in England and Scotland also is restricted chiefly to the drier eastern counties.[1421] It thrives, on the other hand, in Manitoba and the Red River region even with a short season of scant rainfall, because this comes in the spring when moisture is most needed.[1422] Most important to man, therefore, is the question how and when the rainfall is distributed, and with what regularity it comes. Monsoon and trade-wind districts labor under the disadvantage of a wet and dry season, and a variability which brings tragic results, since it easily reduces a barely adequate rainfall to disastrous drought. These are the lands where wind and weather lord it over man. If the rains hold off too long, or stop too soon, or withhold even a small portion of their accustomed gift, famine stalks abroad.

[Sidenote: Temperature and zonal location.]

Temperature, the other important element of climate, depends primarily upon zonal location, which has far different historical results from central and peripheral location, continental and insular. It determines the amount of heat received from the sun, though air and ocean currents may redistribute that heat within certain limits, and humidity or aridity modify its effects. Still zonal distinctions remain. The great climatic regions of the earth, like the hot, wet equatorial belt or the warm, dry trade-wind belts or the cool, well-watered temperate zones, constitute, through the medium of their economic products and their climatically imposed methods of production, so many socio-political areas, regardless of ethnic and political boundaries. The Berber nomads of the northern Sahara live much as the Semitic Bedouins of the Syrian desert or the Turkoman stock of arid Turkestan. They have the same tribal government, the same scattered distribution in small groups, the same economic basis of subsistence, though of different races and dominated respectively by France, Turkey and Russia. The history of the tropical Antilles has in both its economic and political features paralleled that of the East Indies since the early 16th century. Temperate South America promises to follow in the historical footsteps of temperate North America, South Africa in those of Europe and temperate Australia.

[Sidenote: Reactions of contrasted zones.]

While people of the same latitude live approximately under the same temperature conditions, those of contrasted zones are subjected to markedly different influences. They develop different degrees of civilization, wealth, economic efficiency, and density of population; hence they give rise to great historical movements in the form of migration, conquest, colonization, and commerce, which, like convection currents, seek to equalize the differences and reach an equilibrium. Nature has fixed the mutual destiny of tropical and temperate zones, for instance, as complementary trade regions. The hot belt produces numerous things that can never grow in colder countries, while a much shorter list of products, coupled, however, with greater industrial efficiency, is restricted to the Temperate Zone. This explains the enormous importance of the East Indian trade for Europe in ancient and medieval times, the value of tropical possessions for commercial countries like England and Holland. It throws light upon the persistence of the tropical plantation system in the Dutch East Indies and republican Mexico, as formerly in the sugar and cotton fields of the Southern States, with its relentless grip upon the throat of national life in hot lands.

[Sidenote: Temperate products from tropical highlands.]

Tropical regions, however, may profit by the fact that their mountains and plateaus permit the cultivation of temperate crops. India during the last century has introduced tea culture extensively on the Assam and Nilgiri Hills, and in the Himalayan valleys up to an altitude of 7000 feet.[1423] Besides this temperate product, it has put large areas into cotton, chiefly in the peninsular plateau of the Deccan, and by means of these two crops has caused a considerable readjustment in world commerce.[1424] Nevertheless, here the infringement of the principle of tropical production in the torrid zone is after all slight. In tropical America, on the other hand, the case is quite different; this region presents an interesting paradox in relation to its foreign commerce. Here the highlands are the chief seats of population. They contain, moreover, the most industrious and intelligent native stock, due to geographical and historical causes running back into the ancient civilizations, as well as the largest proportions of immigrant Europeans. This is true not only of the Cordilleran states from northern Mexico to the borders of Chile, but also of Brazil, whose center of population falls on the plateau behind Rio de Janeiro and Santos. The isolation of these high plateaus excludes them to a serious extent from foreign trade, while their great altitude permits only temperate products, with the exception of sub-tropical coffee, which is their only crop meeting a great demand. The world wants, on the other hand, the long list of lowland tropical exports which torrid America furnishes as yet in inadequate amounts, owing to the lack of an industrious and abundant lowland population. Commerce will eventually experience a readjustment in these localities to the natural basis of tropical production; but how soon or how effectively this change will take place depends upon the question of immigration of foreign tropical peoples, or the more difficult problem of white acclimatization.[1425]

[Sidenote: Isothermal lines in anthropo-geography.]

Despite some purely climatological objections, anthropo-geography finds the division of climatic zones according to certain isothermal lines of mean annual temperature the most expedient one for its purpose. The hot zone may be taken as the belt north and south of the equator enclosed between the annual isotherms of 20 deg. C. (68 deg. F.) These hold a course generally far outside the two tropics, and in the northern continents frequently reach the thirty-fifth parallel. The temperate climatic zones extend from the annual isotherm of 20 deg. C. to that of 0 deg. C. (32 deg. F.), which bears little relation to the polar circles forming the limits of the solar Temperate Zone. The north temperate climatic zone has been further sub-divided along the annual isotherm of 5 deg. C. (41 deg. F.), distinguishing thus the warmer southern belt, which forms preeminently the zone of greatest historical intensity. The areas beyond the annual isotherms of 0 deg.C. belong to the barren cold zones. [See map page 612.]

[Sidenote: Historical effect of compressed isotherms.]

This isothermal division of the climatic zones is abundantly justified, because the duration of a given degree of heat or cold in any region is a dominant factor in its human, animal, and plant life. A map of the mean annual isotherms of the earth is therefore eloquent of the relation between historical development and this one phase of climate. Where the lines run far apart, they enclose extensive areas of similar temperature; and where they approach, they group together regions of contrasted temperatures. The compression of climatic differences into a small area enlivens and accentuates the process of historical development. It produces the same sort of effect as the proximity of contrasted reliefs. Nowhere else in the world do the tropical and frigid climatic areas, as defined on the north and south by the annual isothermal lines of 20 deg.C. and 0 deg.C. respectively, lie so near together as in Labrador and northern Florida. Separated here by only twenty degrees of latitude, on the opposite side of the Atlantic they diverge so sharply as to include the whole western face of Europe, from Hammerfest and the North Cape down to the Canary Islands and the crest of the Atlas Mountains in Africa, a stretch of forty-two degrees of latitude. This approximation of contrasted climatic districts in North America was an immense force in stimulating the early economic development of the Thirteen Colonies, and in maturing them to the point of political autonomy. It gave New England commerce command of a nearby tropical trade in the West Indies, of sub-tropical products in the southern colonies, in close proximity to all the contrasted products of a cold climate—dense northern forests for naval stores and lumber, and an inexhaustible supply of fish from polar currents, which met a strong demand in Europe and the Antilles. The sudden southward drop of the 0 deg.C. annual isothermal line toward the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes brought the northwestern fur trade to the back gate of New York, where it opened on the Mohawk and upper Hudson, and brought prosperity to the young colony. Even to-day the center of collection for the Canadian fur fields is Quebec, located at 47 deg. north latitude, while the corresponding point of concentration in Europe for the furs of Russia and Siberia is Nizhni-Novgorod, which lies ten degrees farther north.[1426]

[Sidenote: Effect of slight climatic differences.]

This compression of the isotherms emphasizes the differences of national characters produced in part by dissimilar climatic conditions. Contrasts in temperament, manner of life, and point of view, like that between the New Englander and Virginian, Chilean and Bolivian in the Americas, Breton and Provencal in France, Castilian and Andalusian in Spain, Gurkha and Bengali in India, seem to bleach out when they are located far apart, owing to many grades of transition between; but they become striking, stimulating, productive of important economic and political results, when close juxtaposition enables them to react sharply one upon the other. In effecting these nice differentiations of local types, climate is nearly always one of the factors at work, emphasizing perhaps an existing ethnic difference. Even the slight variations of temperature to be found in the same zone or the same climatic region produce distinct results, especially where they are harnessed, as is usually the case, with some other geographic condition of relief, area or soil, pulling in the same direction. Mexico, Peru, Italy, Switzerland, Greece and Asia Minor, with its high plateau interior and its contrasted Euxine and Aegean coasts, represent each a complex of climatic differences, which, reinforced by other geographic factors, have made in these regions a polychrome picture of national life.

[Sidenote: Effect of climate upon distribution of immigration]

Climatic contrasts aid differentiation also by influencing both natural and artificial selection in the distribution of peoples. This effect is conspicuous in the distribution of immigrants in all colonial lands like Africa, South America and in every part of the United States.[1427] The warm, moist air of the Gulf and South Atlantic States is attracting back to the congenial habitat of the "black belt" the negroes of the North, where, moreover, their numbers are being further depleted by a harsh climate, which finds in them a large proportion of the unfit. The presence of a big negro laboring class in the South, itself primarily a result of climate, has long served to exclude foreign immigration, which sought therefore the unoccupied lands and the congenial climate of the more bracing North. Hence it is both a direct and indirect effect of climate that the North shows a large proportion of aliens, and the white population of the South an almost unadulterated English stock.

[Sidenote: Climate and race temperament.]

The influence of climate upon race temperament, both as a direct and indirect effect, can not be doubted, despite an occasional exception, like the cheery, genial Eskimos, who seem to carry in their sunny natures an antidote to the cold and poverty of their environment. In general a close correspondence obtains between climate and temperament. The northern peoples of Europe are energetic, provident, serious, thoughtful rather than emotional, cautious rather than impulsive. The southerners of the sub-tropical Mediterranean basin are easy-going, improvident except under pressing necessity, gay, emotional, imaginative, all qualities which among the negroes of the equatorial belt degenerate into grave racial faults. If, as many ethnologists maintain, the blond Teutons of the north are a bleached out branch of the brunette Mediterranean race, this contrast in temperament is due to climate. A comparison of northern and southern peoples of the same race and within the same Temperate Zone reveals numerous small differences of nature and character, which can be traced back directly or indirectly to climatic differences, and which mount up to a considerable sum total. The man of the colder habitat is more domestic, stays more in his home. Though he is not necessarily more moderate or continent than the southerner, he has to pay more for his indulgences, so he is economical in expenditures. With the southerner it is "easy come, easy go." He therefore suffers more frequently in a crisis. The low cost of living keeps down his wages, so that as a laborer he is poorly paid. This fact, together with his improvidence, tends to swell the proletariat in warm countries of the Temperate Zone; and though here it does not produce the distressing impression of a proletariat in Dublin or Liverpool or Boston, it is always degrading. It levels society and economic status downward, while in the cooler countries of the Temperate Zone, the process is upward. The laborer of the north, owing to his providence and larger profits, which render small economies possible, is constantly recruited into the class of the capitalist.

[Sidenote: Contrasted temperaments in the same nation.]

Everywhere a cold climate puts a steadying hand on the human heart and brain. It gives an autumn tinge to life. Among the folk of warmer lands eternal spring holds sway. National life and temperament have the buoyancy and thoughtlessness of childhood, its charm and its weakness. These distinctions and contrasts meet us everywhere. The southern Chinese, and especially the Cantonese, is more irresponsible and hot-blooded than the Celestial of the north, though the bitter struggle for existence in the over-crowded Kwangtung province has made him quite as industrious; but on his holidays he takes his pleasure in singing, gambling, and various forms of dissipation. The southern Russian is described as more light-hearted than his kinsman of the bleaker north, though both are touched with the melancholy of the Slav. In this case, however, the question immediately arises, how far the dweller of the southern wheat lands owes his happy disposition to the easy conditions of life in the fertile Ukraine, as opposed to the fiercer struggle for subsistence in the glaciated lake and forest belt of the north. Similar distinctions of climate and national temperament exist in the two sections of Germany. The contrast between the energetic, enterprising, self-contained Saxon of the Baltic lowland and the genial, spontaneous Bavarian or Swabian is conspicuous, though the only geographical advantage possessed by the latter is a warmer temperature attended by a sunnier sky. He contains in his blood a considerable infusion of the Alpine stock and is therefore racially differentiated from the northern Teuton,[1428] but this hardly accounts for the difference of temperament, because the same Alpine stock is plodding, earnest and rather stolid on the northern slope of the Alps, but in the warm air and sunshine of the southern slope, it abates these qualities and conforms more nearly to the Italian type of character. The North Italian, however, presents a striking contrast to the indolent, irresponsible, improvident citizens of Naples, Calabria and Sicily, who belong to the contrasted Mediterranean race, and have been longer subjected to the relaxing effects of sub-tropical heat.

[Sidenote: Complexity of the geographic problem.]

Where the climatic difference is small, it is nevertheless often conspicuous enough to eclipse other concomitant factors which are at work, and hence to encourage the formation of some easy blanket theory of climatic influences. But just because the difference is slight, all attending geographic and ethnic circumstances ought to be scrutinized, to insure a correct statement of the geographical equation. The contrast between the light-hearted, gracious peasants of warm, sunny Andalusia and the reserved, almost morose inhabitants of cool and cloudy Asturias is the effect not only of climate but of the easy life in a fertile river plain, opposed to the bitter struggle for existence in the rough Cantabrian Mountains. Moreover, a strong infusion of Alpine blood has given this group of Spanish mountaineers the patience and seriousness which characterizes the race in other parts of continental Europe.[1429] The conditions which have differentiated Scotch from English have been climate, relief, location, geologic composition of the soil, and ethnic composition of the two peoples. The divergent development of Northerners and Southerners in America arose from contrasts in climate, soil and area. It was not only the enervating heat and moisture of the Southern States, but also the large extent of their fertile area which necessitated slave labor, introduced the plantation system, and resulted in the whole aristocratic organization of society in the South.[1430]

[Sidenote: Monotonous climatic conditions.]

When one type of climate extends monotonously over a vast area, as in Russia. Siberia, Central Asia or immense tracts of Africa, the differences of temperature which prick and stimulate national endeavor in small climatic districts here lose much of their force. Their effects flatten out into insignificance, overwhelmed by the encounter with too large a territory. All the southern continents are handicapped by the monotony of their zonal location. The map of annual isotherms shows Africa quite enclosed between the two torrid lines of 20 deg. Centigrade, except for a narrow sub-tropical belt along the Barbary coast in the north, and in the south an equally narrow littoral extending east and north from the Cape of Good Hope. At first glance, the large area of South Africa lying on the temperate side of the Tropic of Capricorn raises hopes for a rich economic, social and cultural development here; but these are dashed by an examination of the isotherms. Excessive heat lays its retarding touch upon everything, while a prevailing aridity (rainfall less than 10 inches or 25 centimeters), except on the narrow windward slope of the eastern mountains, gives the last touch of climatic monotony. The coastal belt of Cape Colony and Natal raise tropical and sub-tropical products[1431] like all the rest of the continent, while the semi-arid interior is committed with little variations to pastoral life. [See maps pages 484 and 487.] Climatic monotony, operating alone, would have condemned South Africa to poverty of development, and will unquestionably always avail to impoverish its national life. South African history has been made by its mines and by its location on the original water route to India; the first have dominated its economic development, and the latter has largely determined its ethnic elements—English, Dutch, and French Huguenots, while the magnet of the mines has drawn other nationalities and especially a large Jewish contingent into the urban centers of the Rand.[1432] In the background is the native Kaffir and Hottentot stocks, whose blood filters into the lower classes of the white population. The diversity of these ethnic elements may compensate in part for the monotony of climatic conditions, which promise to check differentiation. However, climatic control is here peculiarly despotic. We see how it has converted the urban merchants of Holland and the skillful Huguenot artisan of France into the crude pastoral Boer of the Transvaal.

In contrast to South Africa, temperate South America has an immense advantage in its large area lying outside the 20 deg.C. isotherm, and in the wide range of mean temperatures (from 20 deg.C. to 5 deg.C.) found between the Tropic of Capricorn and Tierra del Fuego. Climate and relief have combined to make the mouth of the La Plata River the site of the largest city of the southern hemisphere. Buenos Ayres, with a population of over a million, reflects its large temperate hinterland.

[Sidenote: The effects of Arctic cold.]

Frigid zones and the Tropics alike suffer from monotony, of Arctic the one of cold and the other of heat. The Arctic climatic belt, extending from the isotherm of 0 deg.C. (32 deg.F.) to the pole, includes inhabited districts where the mean annual temperature is less than -15 deg.C. (or 5 deg.F.), as at the Greenland village of Etah on Smith's Sound and the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk. Here the ground is covered with, ice or snow most of the year, and permanently frozen below the surface. Animal and plant life are reduced to a minimum on the land, so that man, with every poleward advance of his thin-strung settlements, is forced more and more to rely on the sea for his food. Hence he places his villages on narrow strips of coast, as do the Norse of Finmarken, the Eskimo and the Tunguse inhabiting the Arctic rim of Asia. Products of marine animals make the basis of his domestic economy. Farther inland, which means farther south, all tribes live by hunting and fishing. The Eurasian Hyperboreans find additional subsistence in their reindeer herds, which they pasture on the starchy lichen (Cladonia rangiferina) of the tundra. [See maps pages 103, 153.]

[Sidenote: Similarity of cultural development.]

Though these Arctic folk are sprung from diverse race stocks, close vicinal location around an enclosed sea has produced some degree of blood relationship. But whatever their origins, the harsh conditions of their life have imposed upon them all a similar civilization. All population is sparse and more or less nomadic, since agriculture alone roots settlement. They have the same food, the same clothing, the same types of summer and winter dwellings, whether it is the earth hut of the Eskimo or of the coast Lapp, the Siberian Yukagirs of the Kolima River, or the Samoyedes of northeastern Russia.[1433] The spur of necessity has aroused their ingenuity to a degree found nowhere in the drowsy Tropics of Africa. Dread of cold led the Yakuts of the Lena Valley to glaze the windows of their huts with slabs of ice, which are better nonconductors of heat and cold, and can be made more perfectly air-tight than glass. Hence these windows have been adopted by Russian colonists. The Eskimo devised the oil lamp, an invention found nowhere else in primitive America, and fishing tackle so perfect that white men coming to fish in Arctic waters found it superior to their own.

Owing to the inexorable restriction of their natural resources, contact with European commerce has impoverished the Hyperborean natives. It has caused the rapid and ruthless exploitation of their meager resources, which means eventual starvation. So long as the Ostyaks, before the coming of the Russians, were sole masters of the vast forests of the Obi Valley, they commanded a supply of fish and fur animals which sufficed for their sparse population. But the greed of the Russian fish dealers and fur traders, and the devastating work of the lumbermen have made double war upon Ostyak sources of subsistence.[1434] The appearance of the white man in Alaskan waters was the signal for the indiscriminate killing of seal and other marine animals, till the Eskimo's supply of food and furs has been seriously invaded, from Greenland to the outermost Aleutian Islands. In all this wide territory, climatic conditions forbid any substitute for the original products, except the domesticated reindeer on the tundra of the mainland; but this would necessitate the transformation of the Eskimo from a hunting to a pastoral people. This task the government at Washington has undertaken, but with scant success.

[Sidenote: Cold and health]

In contrast to the numerous indirect effects of a frigid climate, no direct physiological effect can be positively ascribed to intense cold. It lays no bodily handicap on health and energy, as does the excessive heat of the Tropics. The coldest regions where tillage is possible are tolerable places of residence, because their winters are intensely dry. That of central Siberia, which is drier than the driest desert, makes tent life comfortable in the coldest season, provided the tenter be clad in furs. The low temperatures of the Canadian Northwest for the same reason have not repelled settlers even from the Southern States. Negroes, however, meet a climatic barrier in America at the isotherm of 5 deg. Centigrade (41 deg. F.). They are found in New England and Nova Scotia, generally with a large admixture of white blood; but there and farther north where the climate is moist as well as cold, they show a fatal tendency to pulmonary diseases.

[Sidenote: The small amount of tropical emigration]

The acclimatization of tropical people in temperate regions will never be a question of widespread importance. The negroes were involuntary immigrants to America, under conditions that can never recur. Their concentration in the "black belt," where they find the heat and moisture in which they thrive, and their climatically conditioned exclusion from the more northern states are matters of local significance. Economic and social retardation have kept the hot belt relatively underpopulated. The density map shows much the largest part of it with a population less than 25 to the square mile. Only the small portion contained in India, southernmost China, and Java shows a density over 125 to the square mile (or 50 to the square kilometer). This density has to rise to 500 or more to the square mile before emigration begins. The would-be exiles then have a wide choice of new homes in other tropical lands, where they find congenial climate and phases of economic development into which they will fit. East Indian coolies are found in Cape Colony, Natal, Zanzibar, Trinidad, and British Guiana, where they constitute 38 per cent. of the population.

[Sidenote: Effects of tropical climate.]

The redundant population of crowded western and southern Europe also seek these sparsely inhabited Tropics, but they come heavily handicapped by the necessity of acclimatization. They leave their homes from Trondhjem and Stockholm in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, where the mean annual temperatures vary from 5 deg. to 17 deg. C, (41 deg. to 63 deg. F.), to seek the Torrid Zone which averages 25 deg. C. or 77 deg. F. over most of its territory. The effects of a tropical climate are due to intense heat, to its long duration without the respite conferred by a bracing winter season, and its combination with the high degree of humidity prevailing over most of the Torrid Zone. These are conditions advantageous to plant life, but hardly favorable to human development. They produce certain derangements in the physiological functions of heart, liver, kidneys and organs of reproduction. Bodily temperature rises, while susceptibility to disease and rate of mortality show an increase ominous for white colonization. The general effect is intense enervation; this starts a craving for stimulants and induces habits of alcoholism which are accountable for many bodily ills usually attributed to direct climatic influences. Transfer to the Tropics tends to relax the mental and moral fiber, induces indolence, self-indulgences and various excesses which lower the physical tone.[1435] The social control of public opinion in the new environment is weak, while temptation, due to both climatic and social causes, is peculiarly strong. The presence of an inferior, more or less servile native population, relaxes both conscience and physical energy just when both need a tonic. The result is general enervation, deterioration both as economic and political agents.

[Sidenote: Historical significance of deterioration]

This is the effect of climate which has had the most far-reaching and persistent historical consequences. Our study of the historical movements of peoples in the northern hemisphere revealed a steady influx from colder into tropical and sub-tropical lands, followed always by enervation and loss of national efficiency, due partly to the debilitating heat of the new habitat, partly to its easier conditions of living, whether the intruders came as conquerors and appropriated the fat of the land, or as immigrant colonists who dropped into slack methods of agriculture, because rain and sun and soil made their reluctant labor scarcely necessary. Everywhere in the Tropics the enervating effects of heat, moisture, and abundance make not only the natives averse to steady work, but start the energetic European immigrant down the same easy descent to Avernus. Passing over the deterioration of the Aryans in India, the Persians in Mesopotamia, and the Vandals in Africa, we find that modern instances show the transformation to be very rapid. The French who since 1715 have occupied the islands of Reunion and Mauritius have lost much of their thrift and energy, though their new homes lie just within the southern tropic, and are blessed with an oceanic climate. Yet the volunteer troops sent by Reunion to aid in the recent subjugation of the Hovas in Madagascar proved to be utterly useless.[1436] The Spaniards who come to-day to Mexico have great energy, born of their former hard conditions of life in Spain. But their children are reared in a country whose mean annual temperature, even on the plateau, exceeds that of Spain by 10 deg.C. (or 18 deg.F.), a difference equal to that between Mobile and New York, or Madrid and Christiania. Hence they are less energetic and vigorous, while the third generation are typical Mexicans in their easy-going way of life.[1437] The Germans who recently have colonized southern Brazil in great numbers show a similar deterioration under similar increase of mean annual temperature, combined with somewhat greater humidity, which intensifies the debilitating effects of the heat. An investigation made in 1900 by the International Harvester Company of America revealed the fact that the German farmer in the State of Santa Catharina rarely cultivated over one acre of grain.[1438] Much of the iron in the blood and conscience of the New England missionary stock which went to Hawaii two generations ago has been dissolved out by the warm rain and balmy air of the islands.

[Sidenote: The problem of acclimatization.]

In all these instances the white race has been successfully transplanted. It has domiciled itself on the borders of the Tropics and has propagated its kind, though it has abated some of the vigorous qualities which characterized it in its temperate fatherland. In the real Tropics like India, Cochin China, the Malay Archipelago, and Central Africa, the whole perplexing and urgent problem of European colonization turns on the difficulty or impossibility of acclimatization; and this in turn affects the whole economic, ethnic and political destiny of present colonial holdings. If acclimatization is impossible, the alternative is an imported ruling class, constantly invalided and as constantly renewed, aided by a similar commercial body acting as superintendents of labor; the whole machine of government and economic exploitation is supported by a permanent servile native population, doing the preeminently tropical work of agriculture, which is so fatal to the white man in a torrid climate. This means that the conquering white race of the Temperate Zone is to be excluded by adverse climatic conditions from the productive but undeveloped Tropics, unless it consents to hybridization, like the Spaniards and Portuguese of tropical America. In that national struggle for existence which is a struggle for space, it means an added advantage for the Mediterranean peoples, that they are more tolerant of a torrid climate than the blond Teutons, whose disability in this regard is pronounced; it means that the aptitude of the Chinese for a wide range of climatic accommodation, from the Arctic circle to the equator, lends color to "the yellow peril."

[Sidenote: Historical importance of the temperate zones.]

In contrast to the monotonous extremes of climate in the hot and cold zones, temperate lands are characterized by the intermediate degrees of annual temperature and marked seasonal diversity which are so favorable to human development. In Arctic lands labor is paralyzed by cold as it is by heat in the enervating and overproductive Tropics. In one, the growing season is too short and ill-favored; in the other, too long to stimulate man to sustained industry. Hence the Temperate Zones, whose climate avoids both these extremes and abounds in contrasts, whose summers are productive enough to supply food for the winter, and whose winters give both motive and energy for the summer's work, are richer in cultural possibilities and hence in historical importance.

[Sidenote: Effects of contrasted seasons.]

The advantage of the Temperate Zone is not only its moderate and adequate allowance of heat, but its contrast of seasons. Beyond the range of a vertical sun, grades of temperature change rapidly from latitude to latitude and from summer to winter. The seasons bring variety of activities, which sharply react upon one another. Manufactures were in their origin chiefly winter industries, as they still are in small isolated communities. The modern factory system flourishes best in cooler parts of the Temperate Zone, where the agricultural demands of the summer, spreading over a shorter period, leave a longer time for winter work, and where that once long winter of the Glacial Period, by the scouring action of the ice cap, has reduced the fertile area of the northern fields. The factory system is also favored, as Heinrich von Treitschke maintains, by the predominance of cool or cold weather, which facilitates the concentration of numerous workmen in large buildings, and renders possible long labor hours the year round,[1439]—conditions unthinkable in a warm climate. The iron and steel industries which have grown up about Birmingham, Alabama, find that the long hot summers and mild winters reduce the efficiency of their skilled labor imported from the North.

[Sidenote: Effects of length of seasons.]

[Sidenote: Effect of long winters.]

The length of the seasons is of conspicuous importance. It determines, for instance, whether a given climate permits continuous field work with summer and winter crops, whether field work is possible at all, and how long it is interrupted by excessive cold. Buckle maintains that climate not only enervates or invigorates man, but affects also the constancy of his work and his capacity for sustained labor throughout the year. He considers "that no people living in a very northern latitude have ever possessed that steady and unflinching industry for which the inhabitants of temperate regions are remarkable" and assigns as a reason "that the severity of the weather, and, at some seasons, the deficiency of light, render it impossible for the people to continue their usual out-of-door employments." The result of this he finds to be desultory habits of work, which help to make the national character fitful and capricious. He cites in illustration of his principle the people of the Scandinavian and Iberian peninsulas, whom he finds marked "by a certain instability and fickleness of character," owing to the fact that in Norway and Sweden agricultural labor experiences long interruptions, due to the severity of the winter and the shortness of the days; in Spain and Portugal owing to the heat and drought of summer.[1440] The extreme continental climate of northern of Russia with its violent contrast of the seasons, its severe and protracted winters, enables Leroy-Beaulieu to make a safer application of this principle to the empire of the Czars, which, unlike Scandinavia, feels no ameliorating effect from the mild Atlantic winds and commands no alternative industries like dairy farming, fisheries, and maritime trade.[1441] Hence Leroy-Beaulieu attributes the unsystematic, desultory habits of work prevailing among the northern peasants to the long intermission of labor in winter, and to the alternation of a short period of intense activity with a long period of enforced idleness. He finds them resembling southern peoples in their capacity for sudden spurts of energy rather than sustained effort, thinks them benumbed by the sloth of the far north, which is not unlike the sloth of the south.[1442]

The dominant continental and central location of Russia enables its climatic extremes to operate with little check. The peripheral location of Scandinavia in the path of the Atlantic winds modifies its climate to a mild oceanic type, and its dominant maritime situation gives its people the manifold resources of a typical coast land. Hence Buckle's estimate of national character in the Scandinavian Peninsula has little basis as to fact or cause. Irregularity of agricultural labor does not mean here cessation of all labor, and hence does not produce the far-reaching effect ascribed to it. Only about one-third of the Norwegian population is engaged in agriculture. The restriction of its arable and meadow land to 3 per cent. of the whole territory, and the fact that a large proportion of the people are employed in shipping and the fisheries,[1443] are due to several geographic factors besides climate. The same thing is true of Sweden in a modified degree.

[Sidenote: Complexity of climatic effects.]

Caution should be exercised in drawing conclusions from climate alone or from only one phase of its influence. The duration and intensity of the seasons affects not only the manner of work, but the whole mode of life of a people. On the Yukon, in Iceland, and the high mountain valleys of the Alps, winter puts a check not only upon out-of-door labor, but upon all public or community life. Intercourse stops or is greatly restricted. The outside world drops away. In Iceland, the law courts are in session only in summer when the roads by sea and land are open. In the Kentucky mountains the district schools close before Christmas, when the roads become impassable from rain and snow; the summer is the gala time for funeral services, for only then can the preacher or "circuit-rider" reach the graves made in the winter. Therefore the funerals in one community accumulate, so to speak, and finally, when leisure comes after the August harvest, they make the occasion for important social gatherings. Much of the influence of winter lies in its power to isolate.

It is the economic effects of such periods of enforced idleness which are most obvious, both in their power to restrict national wealth and keep down density of population. When long, they limit subsistence to the products of a short growing season, except where local mining adds considerable sources of revenue. In the Russian government of Yaroslaf, located on the northernmost bend of the Volga within the agricultural belt, and containing the chief inland wheat market of the Empire, the field labor of four months must support the population for the remaining eight months of the year. The half of Russia included in the cold forest zone of the north maintains meagerly a sparse population, and can hope for an increase of the same only by the encouragement of Industrial pursuits. Here the long winter leisure has created the handicrafts on which so many villages rely, and which in turn have given rise to peddling,[1444] as we have seen it do in high mountain regions where altitude intensifies and prolongs the winter season. Agricultural and industrial life are still undivorced, just as in primitive communities. The resulting population has also the primitive mark of great sparsity, so that modern industry, which depends upon a concentrated labor force, is here inhibited. Hence Russian manufactures, which are so active in the governments of Vladimir, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, cease beyond the sixtieth parallel, which defines the northern limit of the agricultural belt and the beginning of the forest and the fur zone.[1445] [See maps pages 8 and 612.]

[Sidenote: Social effects of long winters.]

The rigorous climate of Russia was undoubtedly one cause for the attachment of the peasants to the soil in 1593. This measure was resorted to at a time when the Muscovite dominion from its center in Great Russia had recently been extended at the expense of the Tartars, and had thus embraced fertile southern lands, which tempted the northern peasant away from his unfruitful fields.[1446] This attraction, coupled with the free and hopeful life of the frontier, met the migrant instinct bred in the peasant by the wide plains and far horizon of Russia, so that the north threatened to be left without cultivators. Later, the harsh climatic conditions of the north were advanced as an argument against the abolition of serfdom, on the ground that this system alone secured to the landed proprietor a steady labor supply, and guaranteed to the peasant his maintenance during the long, idle winter.

The duration and severity of the cold season has put a drag upon the wheel of enterprise in Canada, as opposed to the warmer United States. The prairies of the Canadian Northwest, whose fertile soil should early have attracted settlement, were a closed land till railroads could pour into it every summer from the warmer south and east a seasonal tide of laborers. These follow the harvest as it advances from point to point, and then withdraw in autumn either to the lumber camps of eastern Canada, Minnesota and Wisconsin, or to seek other forms of out-door labor in the more southern states, thus lifting from the Canadian farmer the burden of their winter support.

In the lower latitudes of the Temperate Zones, where the growing season is long and the dormant period correspondingly short and mild, we find agriculture based upon clearly distinguished winter and summer crops, as in the northern Punjab (30 deg. to 34 deg. N. L.);[1447] or producing a quick succession of valuable crops, where the fertility of the soil can be maintained by manures or irrigating streams, as in many of the warmer Southern States and in Spain[1448] respectively. In Argentine, where tillage is extensive, land abundant, and population sparse, where, in fact, "skimp farming" is the rule, the shrewd cultivator takes advantage of the long growing season to stretch out his period of sowing and reaping, and thus tills a larger area. The International Harvester Company of America, investigating the reason for the small number of reaping machines employed in Argentine in proportion to the area under cultivation, found that the simple climatic condition of a long growing season enabled one reaper to serve about twice the acreage usual in the United States, because it could work twice as long.[1449]

[Sidenote: Zones of culture.]

Over and beyond slight local variations of climate and season within the same zone, which contribute their quota to economic and historical results, it is the fundamental differences between the hot, cold and temperate climatic zones that produce the most conspicuous and abiding effects. These broad belts, each with its characteristic climatic conditions and appropriate civilization, form so many girdles of culture around the earth. They have their dominant features of heat and cold, variously combined with moisture and aridity, which give a certain zonal stamp to human temperature and development.

The two cold belts have little claim to the name of cultural zones, since their inability to support more than an insignificant population has made them almost a negligible factor in history. [Compare maps pages 8, 9, and 612.] The discoveries and settlements of the Northmen in Greenland remained a barren historical event, though the vikings' ships reached a new hemisphere. Iceland is the only land in this sub-arctic region which ever figured upon the stage of history; and its role was essentially passive. Such prominence as it acquired was due to its island nature and its situation in a swirl of the Gulf Stream, which ameliorates the worst climatic effects of its far northern location, and brings it just within the upper limit of the temperate belt. The wide sub-arctic lowlands of Russia and Siberia, which, from the Ural Mountains to the lower Amur River, stretch the cold zone well below the sixtieth parallel, have at times in the last three centuries and especially in the past decade thrown their great mass into the scale of eastern Asiatic history. This has been possible because the hot summer characteristic of continental climates forces the July isotherm of 20 deg.C. northward over the vast heated surface of Asia nearly to the sixtieth parallel, well within the borders of Siberia. It gives that belt the short but warm growing season with protracted hours of sunshine which is so favorable to cereals, lending to Omsk, Tomsk, Vitimsk and all the stretch of Russian settlements in Siberia, an admirable summer climate like that of the Canadian Northwest.[1450]

[Sidenote: The cradle of civilization.]

The North Temperate Zone is preeminently the culture zone of the earth. It is the seat of the most important, most steadily progressive civilizations, and the source of all the cultural stimuli which have given an upward start to civilization in other zones during the past three centuries. It contains the Mediterranean basin, which was the pulsing heart of ancient history, and all the modern historically important regions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The temperate belt of the southern hemisphere also is following its lead, since European civilization has been transplanted to other parts of the world. This is the zone which least suffers from the drawbacks of climatic monotony or extremes, and best combines, especially in the northern hemisphere, the wide range of annual and seasonal variety so favorable to economic and cultural development, with the incalculable advantage of large land area.

Man grew in the temperate zone, was born in the Tropics. There, in his primitive, pre-civilized state, he lived in a moist, warm, uniform climate which supplied abundantly his simple wants, put no strain upon his feeble intellect and will. That first crude human product of Nature's Pliocene workshop turned out in the steaming lowland of Java, and now known to us as the Pithecanthropus erectus, found about him the climatic conditions generally conceded to have been necessary for man in his helpless, futile infancy. Where man has remained in the Tropics, with few exceptions he has suffered arrested development. His nursery has kept him a child. Though his initial progress depended upon the gifts which Nature put into his hands, his later evolution depended far more upon the powers which she developed within him. These have no limit, so far as our experience shows; but their growth is painful, reluctant. Therefore they develop only where Nature subjects man to compulsion, forces him to earn his daily bread, and thereby something more than bread. This compulsion is found in less luxurious but more salutary geographic conditions than the Tropics afford, in an environment that exacts a tribute of labor and invention in return for the boon of life, but offers a reward certain and generous enough to insure the accumulation of wealth which marks the beginning of civilization.[1451]

Most of the ancient civilizations originated just within the mild but drier margin of the Temperate Zone, where the cooler air of a short winter acted like a tonic upon the energies relaxed by the lethargic atmosphere of the hot and humid Tropics; where congenial warmth encouraged vegetation, but where the irrigation necessary to secure abundant and regular crops called forth inventiveness, cooeperation, and social organization, and gave to the people their first baptism of redemption from savagery to barbarism. Native civilizations of limited development have arisen in the Tropics, but only where, as in Yemen, Mexico and Peru, a high, cool, semi-arid plateau, a restricted area of fertile soil, and a protected location alternately coddled and spurred the nascent people.

As the Tropics have been the cradle of humanity, the Temperate Zone has been the cradle and school of civilization. Here Nature has given much by withholding much. Here man found his birthright, the privilege of the struggle.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XVII

[1409] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 15. London, 1904.

[1410] Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Vol. I, Book XIV. London, 1906.

[1411] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 574-578. New York, 1899.

[1412] Julius Hann, Handbook of Climatology, Part I, pp. 223-224. New York, 1903.

[1413] Isaiah Bowman, Distribution of Population in Bolivia, Bulletin of Geographical Society of Philadelphia, Vol. VII, pp. 40, 41.

[1414] Ratzel, Aus Mexico, p. 415, Note 14. Breslau, 1878.

[1415] Julius Hann, Handbook of Climatology, Part I, pp. 224-227. New York, 1903.

[1416] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 23. London, 1904.

[1417] Julius Hann, Handbook of Climatology, Part I, pp. 171-173. New York, 1903.

[1418] Ibid., pp. 188-189.

[1419] Ibid., pp. 57-58.

[1420] Risley and Gait, Census of India for 1901, Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 14-21, map p. 4. Calcutta, 1903.

[1421] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 173-174. London, 1904.

[1422] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 65-66. London, 1904.

[1423] Ibid., 126-128. Holdich, India, p. 259. London, 1905.

[1424] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 114, 382. London, 1904.

[1425] J. Russell Smith, The Economic Importance of the Tropical Plateaus in America, House Doc. 460, 58-3—53, pp. 829-835. Washington, 1904.

[1426] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 160. London, 1904.

[1427] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, Chap. XV. Boston, 1903.

[1428] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 215-238. New York, 1899.

[1429] Ibid., p. 276, Map p. 274.

[1430] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, p. 280-283. Boston, 1903.

[1431] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 434, 436. London, 1904.

[1432] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 1009. New York, 1902.

[1433] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 218-225. London, 1896-1898.

[1434] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 217.

[1435] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Chap. XXI. New York, 1899.

[1436] Dr. C. Keller, Madagascar, Mauritius, and Other East African Islands, pp. 172-175. London, 1901.

[1437] Matthias Romero, Mexico and the United States, Vol. I, p. 79. New York, 1898.

[1438] From a personal interview with the supervising agent for South America.

[1439] Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, p. 212 et seq. Leipzig, 1897.

[1440] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. I, p. 32. New York, 1884.

[1441] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 320-324. London, 1904.

[1442] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 6, 139-144. New York, 1893.

[1443] Norway, Official Publication, p. 308. Christiania, 1900.

[1444] A. Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 19, 142, 327. New York, 1893.

[1445] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 214, 315. London, 1904.

[1446] A. Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 412-413. New York, 1893.

[1447] Holdich, India, pp. 255-257. London, 1905.

[1448] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 329. London, 1904.

[1449] From an interview with the supervising agent for South America.

[1450] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 356. London, 1904.

[1451] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. I, pp. 31-33. New York, 1884.

THE END