Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (best romantic books to read .txt) 📕
The protection of a water frontier--Pile villages of ancienttimes--Modern pile dwellings--Their geographicdistribution--River-dwellers in old and popular lands--Man'sencroachment upon the sea by reclamation of land--The struggle with thewater--Mound villages in river flood-plains--Social and political gainby control of the water--A factor in early civilization of aridlands--The economy of the water--Fisheries--Factors in maritimeexpansion--Fisheries as nurseries of seamen--Anthropo-geographicimportance of navigation.
CHAPTER XI.
THE ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY OF RIVERS
Rivers as intermediaries between land and sea--Sea navigation mergesinto river navigation--Historical importance of seas and oceansinfluenced by their debouching streams--Lack of coast articulationssupplied by rivers--River highways as basis of commercialpreëminence--Importance of rivers in large countries--Rivers as highwaysof expansion--Determinants of routes in arid or semi-aridlands--Increa
Read free book «Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (best romantic books to read .txt) 📕» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
- Performer: -
Read book online «Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (best romantic books to read .txt) 📕». Author - Ellen Churchill Semple
This growing dependence of a civilized people upon its land is characterized by intelligence and self-help. Man forms a partnership with nature, contributing brains and labor, while she provides the capital or raw material in ever more abundant and varied forms. As a result of this coöperation, held by the terms of the contract, he secures a better living than the savage who, like a mendicant, accepts what nature is pleased to dole out, and lives under the tyranny of her caprices.
NOTES TO CHAPTER III
79.
H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 196. London, 1904.
80.Gardner, Atlas of English History, Map 29. New York, 1905.
81.Hereford George, Historical Geography of Great Britain, pp. 58-60. London, 1904.
82.Lewis Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 62. New York, 1878.
83.Franklin H. Giddings, Elements of Sociology, p. 247. New York, 1902.
84.Schoolcraft, The Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, pp. 198-200, 224. Philadelphia, 1853.
85.Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 231-232, 241.
86.Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 70-73, 88. New York, 1895.
87.McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 392-393, 408, Vol. XIX, of History of North America, edited by Francis W. Thorpe, Philadelphia, 1905. Eleventh Census Report on the Indians, p. 51. Washington, 1894.
88.Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 249-250. New York, 1902-1906.
89.Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 13-15. London, 1904.
90.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 126. London, 1896-1898.
91.Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 24. Stuttgart, 1888.
92.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 131. London, 1896-1898.
93.Paul Ehrenreich, Die Einteilung und Verbreitung der Völkerstämme Brasiliens, Peterman's Geographische Mittheilungen, Vol. XXXVII, p. 85. Gotha, 1891.
94.Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 26, Note 5. Stuttgart, 1888.
95.Ibid., p. 27.
96.Albert Niblack, The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia, pp. 298-299, 304, 337-339. Washington, 1888.
97.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 173. London, 1896-1898.
98.Ibid., Vol. III. pp. 173-174.
99.Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet, Vol. I, p. 184. New York and London, 1903.
100.John de Plano Carpini, Journey in 1246, p. 130. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904.
101.Journey of William de Rubruquis in 1253, p. 188. Hakluyt Society, London, 1903.
102.Volney, quoted in Malthus, Principles of Population, Chap. VII, p. 60. London, 1878.
103.Genesis, Chap. XIII, 1-12.
104.Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I. p. 457. New York.
105.Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, pp. 202-204. Leipzig, 1897.
106.E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 206-207. Boston, 1903.
107.Roscher, Grundlagen des National-Oekonomik, Book VI. Bevölkerung, p. 694, Note 5. Stuttgart, 1886.
108.Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. I, p. 303-313. Oxford and New York, 1892.
109.Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, pp. 31, 52. Stuttgart, 1888.
110.Ibid., p. 56, Note 5.
111.For these and other averages, Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 593-595. New York, 1872.
112.Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, pp. 79-80, p. 81, Note 7. Stuttgart, 1888. William I. Thomas, Source Book for Social Origins, pp. 96-112. Chicago, 1909.
113.Capt. J. Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India, pp. 101-107, 168. London, 1889.
114.Tacitus, Germania, III.
115.Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 32, Note 15 on p. 36. Stuttgart, 1888.
116.E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 202, 203, 212, 213, 236-237. Boston, 1907.
117.Sheldon Jackson, Introduction of Domesticated Reindeer into Alaska, pp. 20, 25-29, 127-129. Washington, 1894.
118.Quoted in Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature in Different Lands, pp. 62, 139. Philadelphia, 1849.
119.Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. I, pp. 311-321. 333-354, 364-366. New York, 1892.
120.Prescott, Conquest of Peru, Vol. I, p. 47. New York, 1848.
121.McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, Vol. XIX, pp. 151-161, of The History of North America, edited by Francis W. Thorpe, Philadelphia, 1905.
122.Ratzel, Anthropo-geographie, Vol. II, pp. 264-265.
123.Malthus, Principles of Population, Chapters V and VII. London, 1878.
124.Nathaniel Shaler, Nature and Man in America, pp. 147-151. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Chap. I, New York, 1899.
125.Justus Perthes, Taschen-Atlas, pp. 44, 47. Gotha, 1910.
The ethnic and political boundaries of Europe to-day are the residuum of countless racial, national, tribal and individual movements reaching back into an unrecorded past. The very names of Turkey, Bulgaria, England, Scotland and France are borrowed from intruding peoples. New England, New France, New Scotland or Nova Scotia and many more on the American continents register the Trans-Atlantic nativity of their first white settlers. The provinces of Galicia in Spain, Lombardy in Italy, Brittany in France, Essex and Sussex in England record in their names streams of humanity diverted from the great currents of the Völkerwanderung. The Romance group of languages, from Portugal to Roumania, testify to the sweep of expanding Rome, just as the wide distribution of the Aryan linguistic family points to many roads and long migrations from some unplaced birthplace. Names like Cis-Alpine and Trans-Alpine Gaul in the Roman Empire, Trans-Caucasia, Trans-Caspia and Trans-Baikalia in the Russian Empire, the Transvaal and Transkei in South Africa, indicate the direction whence the advancing people have come.
Ethnology reveals an east and west stratification of linguistic groups in Europe, a north and south stratification of races, and another stratification by altitude, which reappears in all parts of the world, and shows certain invading dominant races occupying the lowlands and other displaced ones the highlands. This definite arrangement points to successive arrivals, a crowding forward, an intrusion of the strong into fertile, accessible valleys and plains, and a dislodgment of the weak into the rough but safe keeping of mountain range or barren peninsula, where they are brought to bay. Ethnic fragments, linguistic survivals, or merely place names, dropped like discarded baggage along the march of a retreating army, bear witness everywhere to tragic recessionals.
Every country whose history we examine proves the recipient of successive streams of humanity. Even sea-girt England has received various intruding peoples from the Roman occupation to the recent influx of Russian Jews. In prehistoric times it combined several elements in its population, as the discovery of the "long barrow" men and "round barrow" men by archaeologists, and the identification of a surviving Iberian or Mediterranean strain by ethnologists go to prove.126 Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India tell the same story, whether in their recorded or unrecorded history. Tropical Africa lacks a history; but all that has been pieced together by ethnologists and anthropologists, in an effort to reconstruct its past, shows incessant movement,—growth, expansion and short-lived conquest, followed by shrinkage, expulsion or absorption by another invader.127 To this constant shifting of races and peoples the name of historical movement has been given, because it underlies most of written history, and constitutes the major part of unwritten history, especially that of savage and nomadic tribes. Two things are vital in the history of every people, its ethnic composition and the wars it wages in defense or extension of its boundaries. Both rest upon historical movements,—intrusions, whether peaceful or hostile, into its own land, and encroachments upon neighboring territory necessitated by growth. Back of all such movements is natural increase of population beyond local means of subsistence, and the development of the war spirit in the effort to secure more abundant subsistence either by raid or conquest of territory.
Among primitive peoples this movement is simple and monotonous. It involves all members of the tribe, either in pursuit of game, or following the herd over the tribal territory, or in migrations seeking more and better land. Among civilized peoples it assumes various forms, and especially is differentiated for different members of the social group. The civilized state develops specialized frontiersmen, armies, explorers, maritime traders, colonists, and missionaries, who keep a part of the people constantly moving and directing external expansion, while the mass of the population converts the force once expended in the migrant food-quest into internal activity. Here we come upon a paradox. The nation as a whole, with the development of sedentary life, increases its population and therewith its need for external movements; it widens its national area and its circle of contact with other lands, enlarges its geographical horizon, and improves its internal communication over a growing territory; it evolves a greater mobility within and without, which attaches, however, to certain classes of society, not to the entire social group. This mobility becomes the outward expression of a whole complex of economic wants, intellectual needs, and political ambitions. It is embodied in the conquests which build up empires, in the colonization which develops new lands, in the world-wide exchange of commodities and ideas which lifts the level of civilization, till this movement of peoples becomes a fundamental fact of history.
This movement is and has been universal and varied. When most unobtrusive in its operation, it has produced its greatest effects. To seize upon a few conspicuous migrations, like the Völkerwanderung and the irruption of the Turks into Europe, made dramatic by their relation to the declining empires of Rome and Constantinople, and to ignore the vast sum of lesser but more normal movements which by slow increments produce greater and more lasting results, leads to wrong conclusions both in ethnology and history. Here, as in geology, great effects do not necessarily presuppose vast forces, but rather the steady operation of small ones. It is often assumed that the world was peopled by a series of migrations; whereas everything indicates that humanity spread over the earth little by little, much as the imported gypsy moth is gradually occupying New England or the water hyacinth the rivers of Florida. Louis Agassiz observed in 1853 that "the boundaries within which the different natural combinations of animals are known to be circumscribed upon the surface of the earth, coincide with the natural range of distinct types of man."128 The close parallelism between Australian race and flora, Eskimo race and Arctic fauna, points to a similar manner of dispersion. Wallace, in describing how the Russian frontier of settlement slowly creeps forward along the Volga, encroaching upon the Finnish and Tartar areas, and permeating them with Slav blood and civilization, adds that this is probably the normal method of
Comments (0)