Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
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Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, pp. 30-31. Washington, 1894.
267.Dr. William Junker, Travels in Africa, 1882-1886, pp. 30, 31, 34, 37, 44, 50-54, 64, 94-95, 140, 145-148. London, 1892.
268.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 193-195. London, 1896-1898.
269.Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 124-129. Hew York, 1893.
270.D.G. Brinton, The American Race, p. 266. Philadelphia, 1901.
271.Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 484, 485. New York, 1902-06.
272.Nordenskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, p. 291. New York, 1882.
273.H.M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. II, pp. 100-103, 218. In Darkest Africa, Vol. I, pp. 208, 261, 374-375; Vol. II, pp. 40-44.
274.Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. II, chap. XI, 3rd edition, London.
275.Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 411, 436, 532, 533. Washington, 1903.
276.Quatrefages, The Pygmies, pp. 24-51. New York, 1895.
277.Sir T.H. Holdich, India, pp. 202-203, map. London, 1905.
278.Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XII. New York, 1895.
279.Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 66-70, maps facing pp. 64 and 80. New York, 1893.
280.Eleventh Census of the United States, Report on Population, Part I, map p. 23. Washington, 1894.
281.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Chapters 7, 8, 11. New York, 1899.
282.H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 910. New York, 1902.
283.Ibid., pp. 832, 836.
284.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 175, 257. London, 1896-1898.
285.E.C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp. 280-287. Boston, 1903.
286.C.E. Akers, History of South America, 1854-1894, pp. 501-502, 556-562. New York, 1904.
287.E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 14. London, 1882.
288.Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 125-132, map. New York, 1902-1906. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 274, 297, 308, 472-473. New York, 1899.
289.H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 183-191. London, 1904.
290.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 26, 353, 361-365. Map. New York, 1899.
291.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, 214-218. London, 1896-1898.
Every consideration of geographical area must take as its starting point the 199,000,000 square miles (510,000,000 square kilometers) of the earth's surface. Though some 8,000,000 square miles (21,000,000 square kilometers) about the poles remain unexplored, and only the twenty-eight per cent. of the total constituting the land area is the actual habitat of man, still the earth as a whole is his planet. Its surface fixes the limits of his possible dwelling place, the range of his voyages and migrations, the distribution of animals and plants on which he must depend. These conditions he has shared with all forms of life from the amoeba to the civilized nation. The earth's superficial area is the primal and immutable condition of earth-born, earth-bound man; it is the common soil whence is sprung our common humanity. Nations belong to countries and races to continents, but humanity belongs to the whole world. Naught but the united forces of the whole earth could have produced this single species of a single genus which we call Man.
The relation of life to the earth's area is a fundamental question of bio-geography. The amount of that area available for terrestrial life, the proportion of land and water, the reduction or enlargement of the available surface by the operation of great cosmic forces, all enter into this problem, which changes from one geologic period to another. The present limited plant life of the Arctic regions is the impoverished successor of a vegetation abundant enough at the eighty-third parallel to produce coal. That was in the Genial Period, when the northern hemisphere with its broad land-masses presented a far larger area for the support of life than to-day. Then the Glacial Period spread an ice-sheet from the North Pole to approximately the fiftieth parallel, forced back life to the lower latitudes, and confined the bio-sphere to the smaller land-masses of the southern hemisphere and a girdle north of the equator. The sum total of life on the globe was greatly reduced at the height of glaciation, and since the retreat of the ice has probably never regained the abundance of the Middle Tertiary; so that our period is probably one of relative impoverishment and faulty adjustment both of life to life and of life to physical environment.292 The continent of North America contained a small vital area during the Later Cretaceous Period, when a notable encroachment of the sea submerged the Atlantic coastal plain, large sections of the Pacific coast, the Great Plains, Texas and the adjacent Gulf plain up the Mississippi Valley to the mouth of the Ohio.293
The task of estimating the area supporting terrestrial life which the earth presented at any given time is an important one, not only because the amount of life depends upon this area, but because every increase of available area tends to multiply conditions favorable to variation. Darwin shows that largeness of area, more than anything else, affords the best conditions for rapid and improved variation through natural selection; because a large area supports a larger number of individuals in whom chance variations, advantageous in the struggle for existence, appear oftener than in a small group. This position is maintained also by the most recent evolutionists.294
On purely geographical grounds, also, a large area stimulates differentiation by presenting a greater diversity of natural conditions, each of which tends to produce its appropriate species or variety.295 Consider the different environments found in a vast and varied continent like Eurasia, which extends from the equator far beyond the Arctic Circle, as compared with a small land-mass like Australia, relatively monotonous in its geographic conditions; and observe how much farther evolution has progressed in the one than in the other, in point of animal forms, races and civilization. If we hold with Moritz Wagner and others that isolation in naturally defined regions, alternating with periods of migration, offers the necessary condition for the rapid evolution of type forms, and thus go farther than Darwin, who regards isolation merely as a fortunate contributory circumstance, we find that for the evolution of mankind it is large areas like Eurasia which afford the greatest number and variety of these naturally segregated habitats, and at the same time the best opportunity for vast historical movements.
Evolution needs room but finds the earth's surface limited. Everywhere old and new forms of life live side by side in deadly competition; but the later improved variety multiplies and spreads at the cost of less favored types. The struggle for existence means a struggle for space.296 This is true of man and the lower animals. A superior people, invading the territory of its weaker savage neighbors, robs them of their land, forces them back into corners too small for their support, and continues to encroach even upon this meager possession, till the weaker finally loses the last remnant of its domain, is literally crowded off the earth, becomes extinct as the Tasmanians and so many Indian tribes have done.297 The superiority of such expansionists consists primarily in their greater ability to appropriate, thoroughly utilize and populate a territory. Hence this is the faculty by which they hasten the extinction of the weaker; and since this superiority is peculiar to the higher stages of civilization, the higher stages inevitably supplant the lower.
The successive stages of social development—savage, pastoral nomadic, agricultural, and industrial—represent increasing density of population, increasing numerical strength of the social group, and finally increasing geographical area, resulting in a vastly enlarged social group or state. Increase in the population of a given land is accompanied by a decrease in the share which each individual can claim as his own. This progressive readjustment to a smaller proportion of land brings in its train the evolution of all economic and social processes, reacting again favorably on density of population and resulting eventually in the greatly increased social group and enlarged territory of the modern civilized state. Hence we may lay down the rule that change in areal relations, both of the individual to his decreasing quota of land, and of the state to its increasing quota of the earth's surface is an important index of social and political evolution. Therefore the rise and decline not only of peoples but of whole civilizations have depended upon their relations to area. Therefore problems of area, such as the expansion of a small territory, the economic and political mastery of a large one, dominate all history.
Humanity's area of distribution and historical movement call the Oikoumene. It forms a girdle around the earth between the two polar regions, and embraces the Tropics, the Temperate Zones, and a part of the North Frigid, in all, five-sixths of the earth's surface. This area of distribution is unusually large. Few other living species so nearly permeate the whole vital area, and many of these have reached their wide expansion only in the company of man. Only about 49,000,000 square miles (125,000,000 square kilometers) of the Oikoumene is land and therefore constitutes properly the habitat of man. But just as we cannot understand a nation from the study of its own country alone, but must take into consideration the wider area of its spreading activities, so we cannot understand mankind without including in his world not only his habitat but also the vastly larger sphere of his activities, which is almost identical with the earth itself. The most progressive peoples to-day find their scientific, economic, religious and political interests embracing the earth.
Mankind has in common with all other forms of life the tendency toward expansion. The more adaptable and mobile an organism is, the wider the distribution which it attains and the greater the rapidity with which it displaces its weaker kin. In the most favored cases it embraces the whole vital area of the earth, leaving no space free for the development of diversity of forms, and itself showing everywhere only superficial distinctions. Mankind has achieved such wide distribution. Before his persistent intrusions and his mobility, the earth has no longer any really segregated districts where a strongly divergent type of the man animal might develop. Hence mankind shows only superficial distinctions of hair, color, head-form and stature between its different groups. It has got beyond the point of forming species, and is restricted to the slighter variations of races. Even these are few in comparison with the area of the earth's surface, and their list tends to decrease. The Guanches and Tasmanians have vanished, the Australians are on the road to extinction; and when they shall have disappeared, there will be one variety the less in humanity. So the process of assimilation advances, here by the simple elimination of weaker divergent types of men, there by amalgamation and absorption into the stock of the stronger.
This unity of the human species has been achieved in spite of the fact that, owing to the three-fold predominance of the water surface of the globe, the land surface appears as detached fragments which rise as islands from the surrounding ocean. Among these fragments we have every gradation in size, from the
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