Influences of Geographic Environment Part 4

[Sidenote: Effect upon movements of peoples.]

IV. The next cla.s.s belongs exclusively to the domain of geography, because it embraces the influence of the features of the earth's surface in directing the movements and ultimate distribution of mankind. It includes the effect of natural barriers, like mountains, deserts, swamps, and seas, in obstructing or deflecting the course of migrating people and in giving direction to national expansion; it considers the tendency of river valleys and treeless plains to facilitate such movements, the power of rivers, lakes, bays and oceans either to block the path or open a highway, according as navigation is in a primitive or advanced stage; and finally the influence of all these natural features in determining the territory which a people is likely to occupy, and the boundaries which shall separate from their neighbors.

[Sidenote: River routes.]

The lines of expansion followed by the French and English in the settlement of America and also the extent of territory covered by each were powerfully influenced by geographic conditions. The early French explorers entered the great east-west waterway of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, which carried them around the northern end of the Appalachian barrier into the heart of the continent, planted them on the low, swampy, often navigable watershed of the Mississippi, and started them on another river voyage of nearly two thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Here were the conditions and temptation for almost unlimited expansion; hence French Canada reached to the head of Lake Superior, and French Louisiana to the sources of the Missouri, To the lot of the English fell a series of short rivers with fertile valleys, nearly barred at their not distant sources by a wall of forested mountains, but separated from one another by low watersheds which facilitated lateral expansion over a narrow belt between mountains and sea. Here a region of mild climate and fertile soil suited to agriculture, enclosed by strong natural boundaries, made for compact settlement, in contrast to the wide diffusion of the French. Later, when a growing population pressed against the western barrier, mountain gates opened at c.u.mberland Gap and the Mohawk Valley; the Ohio River and the Great Lakes became interior thoroughfares, and the northwestern prairies lines of least resistance to the western settler. Rivers played the same part in directing and expediting this forward movement, as did the Lena and the Amoor in the Russian advance into Siberia, the Humber and the Trent in the progress of the Angles into the heart of Britain, the Rhone and Danube in the march of the Romans into central Europe.

[Sidenote: Segregation and accessibility.]

The geographical environment of a people may be such as to segregate them from others, and thereby to preserve or even intensify their natural characteristics; or it may expose them to extraneous influences, to an infusion of new blood and new ideas, till their peculiarities are toned down, their distinctive features of dialect or national dress or provincial customs eliminated, and the people as a whole approach to the composite type of civilized humanity. A land shut off by mountains or sea from the rest of the world tends to develop a h.o.m.ogeneous people, since it limits or prevents the intrusion of foreign elements; or when once these are introduced, it encourages their rapid a.s.similation by the strongly interactive life of a confined locality. Therefore large or remote islands are, as a rule, distinguished by the unity of their inhabitants in point of civilization and race characteristics. Witness Great Britain, Ireland, j.a.pan, Iceland, as also Australia and New Zealand at the time of their discovery. The highlands of the Southern Appalachians, which form the "mountain backyards" of Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, are peopled by the purest English stock in the United States, descendants of the backwoodsmen of the late eighteenth century. Difficulty of access and lack of arable land have combined to discourage immigration. In consequence, foreign elements, including the elsewhere ubiquitous negro, are wanting, except along the few railroads which in recent years have penetrated this country. Here survive an eighteenth century English, Christmas celebrated on Twelfth Night, the spinning wheel, and a belief in Joshua's power to arrest the course of the sun.[75]

An easily accessible land is geographically hospitable to all new-comers, facilitates the mingling of peoples, the exchange of commodities and ideas. The amalgamation of races in such regions depends upon the similarity or diversity of the ethnic elements and the duration of the common occupation. The broad, open valley of the Danube from the Black Sea to Vienna contains a bizarre mixture of several stocks--Turks, Bulgarians, various families of pure Slavs, Roumanians, Hungarians, and Germans. These elements are too diverse and their occupation of the valley too recent for amalgamation to have advanced very far as yet. The maritime plain and open river valleys of northern France show a complete fusion of the native Celts with the Saxons, Franks, and Normans who have successively drifted into the region, just as the Teutonic and scanter Slav elements have blended in the Baltic plains from the Elbe to the Vistula.

[Sidenote: Change of habitat.]

Here are four different cla.s.ses of geographic influences, all which may become active in modifying a people when it changes its habitat. Many of the characteristics acquired in the old home still live on, or at best yield slowly to the new environment. This is especially true of the direct physical and psychical effects. But a country may work a prompt and radical change in the social organization of an immigrant people by the totally new conditions of economic life which it presents. These may be either greater wealth or poverty of natural resources than the race has previously known, new stimulants or deterrents to commerce and intercourse, and new conditions of climate which affect the efficiency of the workman and the general character of production. From these a whole complex ma.s.s of secondary effects may follow.

The Aryans and Mongols, leaving their homes in the cool barren highlands of Central Asia where nature dispensed her gifts with a miserly hand, and coming down to the hot, low, fertile plains of the Indian rivers, underwent several fundamental changes in the process of adaptation to their new environment. An enervating climate did its work in slaking their energies; but more radical still was the change wrought by the contrast of poverty and abundance, enforced asceticism and luxury, presented by the old and new home. The restless, tireless shepherds became a sedentary, agricultural people; the abstemious nomads,--spare, sinewy, strangers to indulgence--became a race of rulers, revelling in luxury, lording it over countless subjects; finally, their numbers increased rapidly, no longer kept down by the scant subsistence of arid gra.s.slands and scattered oases.

In a similar way, the Arab of the desert became transformed into the sedentary lord of Spain. In the luxuriance of field and orchard which his skilful methods of irrigation and tillage produced, in the growing predominance of the intellectual over the nomadic military life, of the complex affairs of city and mart over the simple tasks of herdsman or cultivator, he lost the benefit of the early harsh training and therewith his hold upon his Iberian empire. Biblical history gives us the picture of the Sheik Abraham, accompanied by his nephew Lot, moving up from the rainless plains of Mesopotamia with his flocks and herds into the better watered Palestine. There his descendants in the garden land of Canaan became an agricultural people; and the problem of Moses and the Judges was to prevent their a.s.similation in religion and custom to the settled Semitic tribes about them, and to make them preserve the ideals born in the starry solitudes of the desert.

[Sidenote: Retrogression in new habitat.]

The change from the nomadic to the sedentary life represents an economic advance. Sometimes removal to strongly contrasted geographic conditions necessitates a reversion to a lower economic type of existence. The French colonists who came to Lower Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found themselves located in a region of intense cold, where arable soil was inferior in quality and limited in amount, producing no staple like the tobacco of Virginia or the wheat of Maryland or the cotton of South Carolina or the sugar of the West Indies, by which a young colony might secure a place in European trade.

But the snow-wrapped forests of Canada yielded an abundance of fur-bearing animals, the fineness and thickness of whose pelts were born of this frozen north. Into their remotest haunts at the head of Lake Superior or of Hudson Bay, long lines of rivers and lakes opened level water roads a thousand miles or more from the crude little colonial capital at Quebec. And over in Europe beaver hats and fur-trimmed garments were all the style! So the plodding farmer from Normandy and the fisherman from Poitou, transferred to Canadian soil, were irresistibly drawn into the adventurous life of the trapper and fur-trader. The fur trade became the accepted basis of colonial life; the _voyageur_ and _courier de bois_, clad in skins, paddling up ice-rimmed streams in their birch-bark canoes, fraternizing with Indians who were their only companions in that bleak interior, and married often to dusky squaws, became a.s.similated to the savage life about them and reverted to the lower hunter stage of civilization.[76]

[Sidenote: The Boers of South Africa]

Another p.r.o.nounced instance of rapid retrogression under new unfavorable geographic conditions is afforded by the South African Boer. The transfer from the busy commercial cities of the Rhine mouths to the far-away periphery of the world's trade, from the intensive agriculture of small deltaic gardens and the scientific dairy farming of the moist Netherlands to the semi-arid pastures of the high, treeless _veldt_, where they were barred from contact with the vivifying sea and its ship-borne commerce, has changed the enterprising seventeenth century Hollander into the conservative pastoral Boer. Dutch cleanliness has necessarily become a tradition to a people who can scarcely find water for their cattle. The comfort and solid bourgeois elegance of the Dutch home lost its material equipment in the Great Trek, when the long wagon journey reduced household furniture to its lowest terms. House-wifely habits and order vanished in the semi-nomadic life which followed.[77]

The gregarious instinct, bred by the closely-packed population of little Holland, was transformed to a love of solitude, which in all lands characterizes the people of a remote and spa.r.s.ely inhabited frontier. It is a common saying that the Boer cannot bear to see another man's smoke from his _stoep_, just as the early Trans-Allegheny pioneer was always on the move westward, because he could not bear to hear his neighbor's watch-dog bark. Even the Boer language has deteriorated under the effects of isolation and a lower status of civilization. The native _Taal_ differs widely from the polished speech of Holland; it preserves some features of the High Dutch of two centuries ago, but has lost inflexions and borrowed words for new phenomena from the English, Kaffirs and Hottentots; can express no abstract ideas, only the concrete ideas of a dull, work-a-day world.[78]

The new habitat may eliminate many previously acquired characteristics and hence transform a people, as in the case of the Boers; or it may intensify tribal or national traits, as in the seafaring propensities of the Angles and Saxons when transferred to Britain, and of the seventeenth century English when transplanted to the indented coasts of New England; or it may tolerate mere survival or the slow dissuetude of qualities which escape any particular pressure in the new environment, and which neither benefit nor handicap in the modified struggle for existence.

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

[34] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. V, p. 166. New York, 1895.

[35] E. Virchow, _Ra.s.senbildung und Erblichkeit_, Bastian Festschrift, pp. 14, 43, 44. Berlin, 1896.

[36] Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 34-35. New York, 1899.

[37] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. I, pp. 8-9. New York, 1895.

[38] P. Ehrenreich, _Die Urbewohner Brasiliens_, p. 30. Braunschweig, 1897.

[39] Ratzel, _Die Erde und das Leben_, Vol. I, pp. 364, 365. Leipzig and Vienna, 1901.

[40] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 79-86, 96, 100. New York, 1899.

[41] T. Waitz, Anthropology, pp. 57-58. Edited by J.F. Collingwood.

London, 1863.

[42] Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, pp.

198-200, 219. Philadelphia, 1853.

[43] Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 33. New York, 1899.

[44] D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, p. 266. New York, 1858.

[45] Alaska, _Eleventh Census Report_, pp. 54, 56. Washington, 1893, and Albert P. Niblack, The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia, p. 237. Washington, 1888.

[46] Fitz-Roy, Voyage of the Beagle, Vol. II, pp. 130-132, 137, 138.

London, 1839.

[47] H. Bancroft, Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 88-89. San Francisco, 1886.

[48] S. Stanhope Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, pp. 103-110. New Brunswick and New York, 1810.

[49] For full discussion see A.R. Wallace's article on acclimatization in Encyclopedia Britanica, and W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe. Chap. XXI.

New York, 1899.

[50] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 39-41. Philadelphia, 1901.

[51] Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 34-35. New York, 1899.

[52] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 137-138. London, 1897.

[53] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 58-71, Map. New York, 1898.

[54] _Ibid._, p. 566. D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 29-30.

Philadelphia, 1901.

[55] D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, p. 607. New York, 1858.

[56] Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, p. 83, New York, 1859.

[57] P. Ehrenreich, _Die Urbewohner Brasiliens_, p. 32. Braunschweig, 1897.

[58] T. Waitz, Anthropology, pp. 46-49. Edited by Collingwood, London, 1863.

[59] _Philippine Census_, Vol. I, p. 552. Washington, 1903.

[60] F. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 106. London, 1908.

[61] Major Charles E. Woodruff, The Effect of Tropical Light on the White Man, New York, 1905, is a suggestive but not convincing discussion of the theory.

[62] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 74-77. New York, 1899.