... UNIVERSITY OCT £11020 LIBRARY THE GEOGKAPHEB AND HISTOEY. By Ellsworth Huntington. {From 'The Geographical Journal' for January, 1914.) ^ Eld tfsz THE GEOGRAPHER AND HISTORY. By ELLS-Vv-ORTH HUNTINGTON. (From ' The Geographical Journal ' for January, 1914.) The geographer is often disappointed because his fellow-workers, the historians, pay so little attention to results which he considers of funda mental importance. At the beginnings of their volumes the historians speak respectfully of the influence, of geographical environment, but that is usually all. Thenceforth they become so impressed with the importance of economic considerations, or of purely human matters, such as ambition, religious ardour, mechanical invention, constructive statesmanship, or scientific, literary, and artistic achievement, that they feel that other subjects are scarcely worth considering. The location of a plain, to be sure, is men tioned as determining the site of a city, a defensible river-crossing is noted as causing a battle to occur at one spot rather than another, and a mineral product is recognized as the cause of the aggregation of a large manufacturmg population. But, after all, what is the plain when weighed against the artistic impulse which spreads from the city and influences the world for generations ? What is the river compared with the royal ambition which stirred up the bloody war wherein the battle is only a single incident ? Or what is the mineral in contrast with the socialistic propaganda which spreads among the underpaid labourers in the factories ? Why should the historian take time to expatiate on plains, rivers, and minerals when he cannot say a tithe of what he desires as to art, ambition, and socialism ? The geographer accepts the historians' view that these things are more important and, to most people, more interesting than plains, rivers, and minerals. He adds, however, that art, ambition, and socialism are the expression of human character, and human character is in many ways moulded by physical environment. Then he goes on to explain the faith that is in him, but his explanation has been marred by grave mistakes. 20 THE GEOGRAPHER AND HISTORY. He believes that he has hold of a fundamental truth of the first magni tude ; but, somehow, he has thus far failed to gain wide acceptance of his belief. Great numbers of people, to be sure, are ready nominally to accept his view, but for the actual application of it, he searches almost in vain. The reason for this partial failure of the geographers is not far to seek. We have gone too far, and asserted too much, and in many cases it has seemed to our fellow-workers that we have failed to give due weight to intellectual, moral, and religious influences. Our beliefs may be true, but many of them require further demonstration. Two quotations will illustrate the matter. They seem to show that there are at least three chief lines along which our work needs to be strengthened. First, we must insist on greater numerical exactness ; second, we must elucidate the action of indirect as well as direct geographical influences ; and, third, we must emphasize the selective action of geographical environment. The first illustration is from the excellent article on Greece in the last edition of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' vol. 12, p. 426. " The physical features of [Greece] played an important part in mould ing the character of its inhabitants. Protected against foreign invasion by the mountain barriers, and to a great extent cut off from mutual intercourse except by sea, the ancient Greek communities developed a marked individuality and a strong sentiment of local patriotism ; their inhabitants were both mountaineers and mariners ; they possessed the love of country, the vigour and courage which are always found in high- landers, together with the spirit of adventure, the versatility and the passion for freedom characteristic of a seafaring people. The great variety of natural products as well as the facility of maritime communication tended to the early growth of commercial enterprise, while the peculiar beauty of the scenery, though little dwelt upon in ancient literature, undoubtedly quickened the poetic and artistic instincts of the race. The effects of physical environment are no less noticeable among the modern Greeks. The rural populations of Attica and Bceotia, though descended from Albanian colonists in the Middle Ages, display the same contrast in character which marked the inhabitants of those regions in ancient times." The second illustration is taken from one of my own books, ' The Pulse of Asia.' "Among primitive men the nature of the province which a tribe happens to inhabit determines its mode of life, industries, and habits ; and these in turn give rise to various moral and mental traits, both good and bad. Thus definite characteristics are acquired, and are passed on by inheritance or training to future generations " (p. 15). " The plateaus and deserts of Central Asia entail upon the Khirghiz the nomadic life, and this accentuates certain characteristics, such as hardihood, hospitality, laziness, morality, and family affection. The oases THE GEOGRAPHER AND HISTORY. 2l of the basin floors, on the other hand, cause the Chantos to practise intensive agriculture ; and the sheltered easy life, thus made possible, seems to induce weakness of will, cowardice, immorality, and the weakening of those ties between parents and children which lead to careful training of the growing generation. Religion and other causes play an important part, but still there remains much of the character of the Chantos and Khirghiz which owes its origin more or less directly to physical conditions. This is probably true of all races. Not that a single individual's character in a civilized community is directly influenced to so great an extent by the inorganic world around him. He inherits, or receives through the training of others, most of what he is. Nevertheless, inheritance is merely the summation of past training ; the training of the average man is strictly in accordance with the social order in which he is born ; and the social order owes much of its- character to the sea, the plains, the forest, the mountains, or the factory river, by which the occupation of the majority of the people is determined. Those who belong to the so-called upper classes of society are apt to forget that the average man is limited by physiographic conditions much more closely than they; and the limitations become closer the farther back we go toward the savage state. When all this is considered, it becomes almost impossible to assign limits to the influence of physical environment upon character " (p. 361). Both quotations could be improved in two respects. In the first place they are too sweeping and parts of them are couched in the form of positive statements of facts, whereas they are really theories to which many able scholars take exception. In the second place, even if they are fundamentally true, they give the impression that geographical influences are more direct than is actually the case. Let us examine them in detail, beginning with the quotation from the ' Encyclopaedia.' I have chosen this particular illustration partly because it happens recently to have attracted my attention, and partly because, although the author is not a professional geographer, he has written an article of unusual merit, and his point of view is typical of a large school of writers on geography. The quotation here given is so representative of the best geographical thought, that it seems wise to devote to it more space than. to the other. Passing by the first part of the quotation as to Greece, let us take the phrase " They [the Greeks] possessed the love of country, the vigour and courage which are always found in highlanders, together with the spirit of adventure, the versatility and the passion for freedom characteristic of a seafaring people." The clear implication is that they possessed these two sets of qualities because they lived among the mountains and at the same time had ready access to the sea. It is certainly true that the ancient Greeks were in part highlanders, although the most influential portion of the population lived in small plains, such as those of Attica, Argolis, and Lacadaemon. It is also true that they possessed love of country, 22 THE GEOGRAPHER AND HISTORY. vigour and courage in a high degree. Are these two facts necessarily connected ? The first step in answering this question is by means of mathematics. We must take all the countries of the world, classify their inhabitants according to whether they possess the given qualities in a high or low degree, and then see whether the highlanders as a whole average much better than the lowlanders. It is easy to pick out countries such as Scot land, Norway, Switzerland, and Japan which agree with ancient Greece in supporting the conclusions of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica.' It is equally easy to say that the modern Greeks do not possess the supposed qualities of highlanders to anything like the extent that their ancestors did, and to pick out other highland countries which are much more deficient. For instance, South China, eastern Siberia, Mexico, and Central America are highland countries, but few people would cite their inhabitants as examples of love of country, vigour, and courage. Tibet and much of Persia are highlands, but both are notable for the cowardice, lack of vigour, and lack of real patriotism which characterize their people. We might name other highland countries part of which support our author's assumption while an equal number refute it. Or we might contrast the patriotism, vigour, and courage of the Dutch, most of whom have never seen even a hill, with the lack of patriotism, inertia, and cowardice of the Guatemalans, most of whom never go out of doors without being within sight of mountains. When we inquire as to " the spirit of adventure, the versatility and the passion for freedom characteristic of a seafaring people " we are again met by contradictions, Possibly the Eskimo, South Sea islanders, and Zanzibaris possess these traits in a somewhat attenuated form, but many persons would pick out these races' as examples of almost the opposite characteristics, and yet they are pre-eminently seafarers. On the other hand, when compared with these races, the people of the Caucasus, the south Germans, the Poles, and the Swiss might well be described as pos sessing a " spirit of adventure, . . . versatility, and the passion for freedom " in spite of having nothing to do with the sea. Coming npw to the next statement, we read that "the great variety of natural products as well as the facility of maritime communication tended to the early growth of commercial enterprise." The opponent of this view will probably admit that facility of maritime communication is certainly an important factor, but he will perhaps claim that Greece does not have a great variety of natural products, and is in fact a decidedly poor country. Moreover, it is an open question whether a great variety of such products is a necessary condition for the development of a com mercial people. England began to hold a high place commercially when she was still comparatively poor in natural resources, at least in those that had yet been exploited. Holland, even now, would be a poor country were it not for the extraordinary industry of her people. On the other THE GEOGRAPHER AND HISTORY. 23 hand, New Guinea, Borneo, and the Philippine islands are genuinely rich in natural products, and possess great facility of maritime communication, but these things have not greatly " tended to the early growth of com mercial enterprise." "The peculiar beauty of the scenery" in these East Indian regions has been equally ineffective in quickening "the poetic and artistic instincts of the race," although the beauty, judged by most standards, is greater than that of Greece. It would be easy to point out case after case where the supposed geo graphical principles illustrated by this account of Greece are flatly contra dicted. I by no means intend to imply that there is no truth in them, but merely that they have not been fully elucidated and properly applied, or else that due allowance has not been made for other factors. One trouble, as has already been indicated, is that we have failed to make our science exact, and hence our results partake more or less of the nature of guesses. Small wonder, then, that the historians, with their minds bent on definitely recorded facts, have not felt the necessity of utilizing our conclusions as much as seems to us advisable. They say that human character moulds physical environment more than environment moulds character. A man with British pluck or hard-headed German persistence can get a good living where a lazy, incompetent African would starve. An artist will see beauty in the most barren desert or the most sombre forest, whereas a transcendent combination of islands, mountains, forests, cliffs, blue sky, and billowy sea will have no effect on the man whose soul is dull and sodden. The Greeks, they say, were great because of some innate racial quality which had no ascertainable connection with environ ment. It was that which gave to their minds a quickness and energy which made them capable of the love of country, vigour, and courage which the highlands perhaps may have fostered ; the same quality endued them with the spirit of adventure, the versatility, and the passion for freedom which found full scope because of the peculiar relation of Greece to the sea. Because of their mental energy the Greeks, even though their country was no richer than many others, took advantage of what wealth they had and of their favourable location and great facility of communica tion, and thus commercial enterprise became highly developed among them. Similarly the alertness of their minds caused the evolution of art, and their environment simply permitted the expression of their natural tendencies. Thus, after all, say the historians, physical environment is of small importance compared with racial character, and character arises from causes which no one as yet really understands. To this the geographers offer no convincing reply. It would be convincing if they could say, " All ,r races who have lived in a beautiful environment have developed -artis tically," or " All who have lived in highlands have been brave," or " All dwellers in archipelagos off the coasts of continents have become highly commercial." We cannot say these things with any conviction, however, and even in such matters as the relation of a moist, tropical climate to the 24 THE GEOGRAPHER AND HISTORY. inertia of equatorial races we cannot yet frame positive geographical laws. This is partly because we have not made our work sufficiently statistical, and partly because the elements of racial character, or heredity, and of moral and religious ideals introduce so many complications which have not yet been unravelled. Hitherto geographers have usually taken examples here and there. In the future we must base our results on all the countries in the world. If we are studying commerce, for example, we must divide the world into divisions of approximately equal size, either countries or parts of countries, and proceed to separate these into groups according to some fair and definite standard of trade per capita, both internal and external. Next we must examine each group to see what qualities all of its members possess in common. We shall presumably find that those in the first group, that is, those most highly developed commercially, are all or almost all located on the seacoast and in the temperate zone, but that they include both the Latin and Teutonic races, and perhaps the Japanese. Further search may show that the regions of this class almost always, but perhaps not absolutely always, possess coasts with a considerable number of easily accessible harbours which are rarely or never frozen. It may further appear that they either possess a temperate climate of the type where cyclonic storms bring rain at all seasons or else fall in the region where such conditions prevail most of the year, but a moderate degree of subtropical drought prevails in summer. Moreover, we may also find that in certain places recent migration from one of the older commercial nations causes places not possessing the above-mentioned characteristics to fall into the first class. Finally, having completed our examination of the present, we must make a similar test of the past. Before that can be done, however, we must have definite knowledge as to the climatic and other geographical conditions at the specific time when any ancient country rose to the first class. When our survey has thus been extended as far and as definitely as possible both in time and space, we shall at last, perhaps, be able to formulate a genuine law as to the geographic conditions under which commercial development takes place. We shall probably find that for high commercial development the following elements are essential. First, a moderate degree of accessibility to other countries ; second, an interior which is fairly productive ; and third, a climate characterized by a strong differentiation of the seasons, and by a somewhat low temperature during at least part of the year. With these physical qualities we shall also probably find that a certain definite type of energetic racial character is always requisite, and that when this type of character is transported to other geographical environ ments, commerce, for a time at least, thrives there also. Thus even when this long process of investigation is complete we may still be left in doubt as to whether such a phenomenon as commercial development is primarily due to physical environment, or to racial character, or whether it is due THE GEOGRAPHER AND HISTORY. 25 to both and the two are inextricably connected. When geographers have made exhaustive studies of this particular point and of hundreds like it, their results will be gladly accepted by historians, economists, and other students of human evolution. Turning now from the necessity of careful mathematical analysis to the importance of indirect rather than direct influences, let us consider the last words of the quotation from the ' Encyclopaedia.' " The effects of physical environment are no less noticeable among the modern Greeks. The rural populations of Attica and Bceotia, though descended from Albanian colonists in the Middle Ages, display the same contrast in character which marked the inhabitants of those regions in ancient times." Apparently the Albanians who came to Bceotia and to Attica in the Middle Ages were of the same stock, and engaged in essentially the same occupations, chiefly agriculture. Those who settled in Attica were influenced somewhat by the city of Athens, and by its relatively active life, and many authors would ascribe to that the difference between them and their brothers in Boeotia. Doubtless this has had its effect, and it is one of the important indirect influences of geographical environment. Nevertheless, this does not fully explain the matter. The Albanians who came to Bceotia were located in a place where they were more in contact with the world than in their original mountain homes. Therefore, they ought to have responded somewhat to this, although not so much as the Atticans. On the contrary, they 'seem to have declined in energy and alertness, and to have become dull and stupid. There seems to be no geographical cause which can be directly connected with this result, but is there any which would produce it indirectly ? The work of Sir Ronald Ross seems to suggest that such an indirect cause may be found in the comparatively poor drainage of Boeotia and good drainage of Attica. Till recently one of the most prominent physical features of Boeotia has been the Lake of Copais with the marshy lands which surround it. These have long been great breeding- places of the anopheles species of mosquitoes, which carry malaria. Accordingly, Bceotia has been regarded as one of the most malarial places in Greece. Greece, itself, as is well known, is one of the most malarial countries in Europe. According to Ross, at least a third of the Greeks during their childhood suffer from malaria so seriously that they are permanently weakened. Many show enlarged spleens or other evidence of physical deterioration. The investigations of W. L. S. Jones, combined with those of Ross, seem to show that in the days when Greece was in her prime, malaria was much less prevalent than at present, and that the increase of the disease from the fourth to the second century B.C. may have been an important factor in occasioning the decline of Greek character. Even in ancient times, however, Boeotia was apparently afflicted with fevers more severely than were other parts of the country. Attica, on the other hand, both now and in the past, has been 26 THE GEOGRAPHER AND HISTORY. relatively dry with few undrained marsh lands, and with little irrigated land where the water stands long enough to breed mosquitoes. Hence it has never suffered so greatly as Boeotia. One of the points which Ross and Jones emphasize is that malarial fevers not only weaken the physiological functions, but have a serious influence upon mental activity. No one who has travelled much in malarial countries can question this. The man who suffers from malaria for a month or so at the end of the summer in Asia Minor, for example, as every traveller knows, often becomes weak and inefficient. He is apt to lose his energy and initiative. He may do his work from day to day, but it is done languidly and carelessly. Moreover, the effects do not pass at once, but can be distinctly seen for weeks or months. No disease is more insidious, especially where it is endemic rather than epidemic. Under such circumstances it is pre-eminently a disease of childhood. The great majority of the children suffer from it at an early age and there seem to be few who are genuinely immune. The effects in childhood are apparently far more lasting than in maturity. If the children of a community suffer seriously from malaria, they are likely to grow into men and women who are weakened physically and dulled mentally. Hence it seems not im probable that the much greater prevalence of malaria among the Albanians who settled in Bceotia than among those in Attica may account for the present difference in character, and the same cause may account for the difference between the ancient Boeotians and Atticans of Hellenic stock. Fortunately the means of testing this theory are at hand. The Lake of Copais has been drained by a French company. The swamps are dis appearing, and if due preventive measures are taken in the irrigated lands of the old lake-bottom, mosquitoes will soon become no more abundant in Boeotia than in Attica. If malaria is really the cause of the Boeotian dulness, the people there ought to improve within a few generations. How long such a process should take is of course uncertain, since we cannot tell how far the disease has weeded out or driven away some of the best elements and has permanently weakened the physical stamina of those who remain. At any rate, it is evident that we have here an example of a possible type of indirect geographical effects, which may be of high importance. This does not end the matter. In an article on " The Burial of Olympia " in the Geographical Journal, vol. 36 (1910), pp. 657-686, 1 have shown that changes of climate, which seem to have taken place in Greece, may have done much to increase the amount of malaria at certain times, and to decrease it at others. Apparently from about 400 to 200 B.C., as indicated by the trees of California on the one hand, and by various lines of evidence in Asia on the other, Greece became increasingly arid, but by a curious apparent contradiction there was a distinct increase in the amount of stagnant water in the Greek valleys and basins. This would tend to THE GEOGRAPHER AND HISTORY. 27 breed mosquitoes, and might do much to increase disease. It is well known that at this time the character of the Greeks declined greatly, and this indirect geographical influence may have been a factor. At the same time, if we are right as to the occurrence of climatic changes, the productivity of the country must have fallen off greatly ; many farming communities must have been reduced to poverty, not all at once but little by little ; the standards of comfort must have been lowered ; the amount of products available for cpmmerce must have declined ; the tendency to emigrate to the towns or to other countries must have been stimulated ; and in all these ways a distinct change in the character of the people must have been encouraged. How great these indirect influences may. have been we cannot yet say, but they are certainly worthy of profound study. Let us now turn to the second of the two quotations which serve as our text. The point of view is similar to that of the quotation on Greece except that there is more recognition of the fact that physical environment does not act directly in producing its supposed results upon human character, but indirectly through various steps. Nevertheless, the quota tion conveys a wrong impression, as is evident from the words italicized in the following sentences : — " The nature of the province which a tribe happens to inhabit determines its mode of life, industries, and habits ; and these in turn give rise to various moral and mental traits, both good and bad. Thus definite charac teristics are acquired, and are passed on by inheritance, or training to future generations." These words, as well as others in the quotation, suggest that physical environment acts with a far greater directness than is probably the case. They seem to ascribe to it a motive power which it does not actually possess. Nevertheless, in the volume from which this quotation is taken, and much more in later writings I have tried to show that geographical surroundings are not in themselves a source of energy or movement, as it were ; that is, that they are not the source from which human development arises, but are merely forces which serve to guide movements already initiated, or to mould plastic materials whose substance has been created by some other power. These metaphors, however, express only a part of the truth. They do not touch upon the fact that in geography, just as in biology, the main function of environment is the selection of certain characteristics for preservation or extinction. Every geographer probably recognizes the truth of this statement, but it rarely finds definite expression. In the organic phases of the science of geography our task is not to determine how variations in the animate creation arise, but to determine how, when variations have once arisen, they are selected for preservation in one region but not in another. In other words, our object is to discover how the selective action of geographical environment controls the distribu tion of animate nature. This includes not only the distribution of biological