Influences of Geographic Environment Part 72

[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 pa.s.sive. 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 ma.s.s into the scale of eastern Asiatic history. This has been possible because the hot summer characteristic of continental climates forces the July isotherm of 20C.

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 acc.u.mulation 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, cooperation, 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.