The Historical Element in Geographical Science.
While so many a spot in the great continental land-mass was once the home of a high culture, and from being a cradle of arts and sciences has become a deserted waste, the civil and political condition of many people in the remote districts on the oceanic side of the globe has advanced with unprecedented rapidity. The course of development has been very different from what it was formerly. Distances, natural influences, natural productions even, yield always to the victorious march of man, and disappear before his tread; or, in other words, the human race is more and more freed from the forces of nature; man is more and more disenthralled from the dominion of the earth which he inhabits. The history of specific districts and of entire continents confirms this.
The first inhabitant of the sandy valley of the Nile was a dweller in a waste, as the nomadic Arab is to-day. But the later and more cultivated Egyptians transformed that waste, through the agency of irrigation and canals, into the most fruitful garden of the world. They not only rose themselves, but raised their own country, hitherto so sterile, into a place of the first importance, and did it by the simplest of means,—the bringing the water and the land into more intimate relations. Through neglect and the tyranny of successive kings, the fruitful valley sank again into its waste condition. The district around Thebes became a desert, the fruitful Mareotis a swamp; similar phenomena occurred in many parts of Europe and Asia.
Another example of man’s subjugation of nature is found in great mountain chains. During the first centuries after Christ, the cultivated south of Europe was separated from the uncultivated Celtic and Teutonic north by a great natural barrier, the unbroken, untraversed Alpine chain, which passed through all central Europe from west to east. At the south lay the rich states of the old world, beyond the Alps was the cold and barren north. But this old formidable barrier has vanished, as the thronged cantons of Switzerland and the crowded villages of the Tyrol yearly bear witness; and they draw thousands of tourists instead of repelling them. What a mighty change! From Provence to Styria run the stately forms of the Alpine chain; but the deep recesses and the lofty highlands are thickly peopled, the forests are thinned, the obstructing rocks removed. No longer a barrier between the north and the south, as it was in the time of Julius and Augustus Cæsar, Switzerland has become a country of stupendous highways. The peaks which were once unapproachable, and around which merely eagles idly flew, are now the passes of Mount Cenis, the Simplon, Saint Gothard, the Splügen, and Saint Bernard; while the snowy heights of Ortler, in eastern Alps, now give place to a public road. Over the Semmering Alp a railway even passes. Just as the wild horse of Toorkistan has given up his freedom and has become the tame and useful servant of civilization, so this Alpine segment of the globe has changed all its relations to the adjacent countries. The influence of the most stupendous natural objects is weakened every year. The physical dimensions may and do remain unchanged, but their influence on life and on history is undermined by those new conditions which operate so powerfully in freeing man from the dominion of nature. The power of man makes him master of the earth, and gives even the key to the subjection of the grandest mountain chains into his hands.
In further illustration of this, take the Ural chain, which was and still is the eastern division line of one continent, and the western barrier of another, but which has become, since the days of Peter the Great, a grand center of labor and commerce, a great avenue of civilization in its return passage from Europe to Asia. And so everywhere, from the wild Caucasus and the Himalayas to the grand Cordilleras of America, the same progress is seen; man becomes more and more the conqueror over nature. And not in mountains alone, but in the great forest regions of central Europe, in the primitive wilderness of North America, and in the marshes of the Netherlands, does man vanquish the forces which once fettered him. The once fearful wastes of Sahara have become the track of caravans; the sterile plains of Australia and California have drawn great colonies to their gold mines; the ice seas at the north have become, through the efforts of Parry, Franklin, and others, the scene of heroic exploits and of grand struggles of man with nature; indeed, the greatest victories of modern civilization have been there, and the playgrounds of polar bears and walruses have witnessed the noblest humanities, and the loftiest courage, and the most disinterested heroism of the age.
The continents and oceans have witnessed still greater transformations. The seas were once the impassable barriers of nations. The birds of the air only traversed the great distances which separated shore from shore. The metallic stores of the earth, the vegetable and animal kingdoms were not transferred to any extent from place to place; the sea brought nothing from lands remotely foreign but drift-sand, cocoa-nuts, floating wood, ice masses, and seaweed, swept by the great currents from shore to shore. But now the seas are no barriers; they do not separate the continents but bind them together, and unite the destinies of nations in the closest manner. The great improvements in ocean navigation have entirely changed the relations of the entire globe. The isolated island of St. Helena, which was for centuries at the very confines of the known world, became, within the second decade of the present century, a prison-house for the great European robber, and lay guarded under the eye of Europe. The Cape of Good Hope, which was for centuries the limit of Portuguese navigation, has become a mere halting-place for sailing ships and steamers. The voyage from England to China has been narrowed, within one hundred years, from an eight months’ to a four months’ sail. These great changes have been mainly effected by the agency of steam. Steam has transformed the smaller seas into mere bridges, and England and France are securely joined, Marseilles and Algiers; while Prussian Stettin is brought into proximity with Swedish Stockholm and Russian Petersburg. The voyage to America, that remote land, which before the days of Columbus was as inaccessible as the moon, was made by him in seventy days, but is now accomplished in ten. Even Australia cannot be said to be distant; a steamer needs but seventy-five days to reach it, and ten of those are consumed on the Isthmus of Suez. No island now lies beyond the world of commerce. The most active traffic exists between places the most remote. The wool and the wheat of Australia control the price of those commodities in London, and the value of cotton in America fixes that of woven goods and even of bread in Europe.
The great rivers too have been curtailed of their relative importance, and have been shortened by steam sixfold. They can be stemmed too, which is an immense gain, for in the primitive stages of navigation they could only be sailed upon downward, from source to mouth. In 1854, four hundred steamers traversed the Mississippi and its branches, and came into contact with a region one-third as large as Europe. The Indus, Ganges, Irrawaddy, Nile, La Plata, and even the Amazon, the monarch of rivers, which drains a country half as large as Europe, are now more or less open to steam navigation. The great river systems of central Europe too are thoroughly navigated; and Southern Germany, Trebizond, Mayence, Cologne, and London may be grouped as neighbors. The land-locked seas are reduced to insignificance, and their shores are now covered with villages and cities, from the Platten-See of Hungary up to the Caspian and the great lakes of North America.
To sum all up in one word, the mighty influence of Time on the geographical development of the earth is displayed in the clearest manner. But this influence is not the same for all localities on the globe. While there are some people and some places which are left behind, there are others which have made wonderful progress, and have taken and now hold a foremost place. And such a position is that of Europe at the present moment. Europe, the most central of all continents, in relation to the great land-mass of the earth, and also the one most equally removed from the middle point of the great water-mass, touches the whole remaining world at the greatest number of points, and this, in conjunction with her remarkably broken coast-line, so favorable to the purposes of navigation, have given her her place of command, and have assigned to England her evident role of mistress of the seas.
And looking from the present to the past, we see that as some great tribes of men have given the whole fruits of their natural existence to the world for its future use, so some places, and those of no insignificant size sometimes, have conferred upon the world, the trust which they once held, and now recede, as it were, from view. They were great in the past, and the results of their greatness are now incorporated in the world’s life. The earth is one; and through the agency of what we may call either time or history, all its parts are in ceaseless action and reaction on each other. Though some great districts seem now to have no part to play, the element of time draws them into the great cosmos; they once had a great share in the world’s affairs, and the fruits which they brought to completion are merely in other hands. The earth is, therefore, as was stated in the introduction, a unit, an organism of itself: it has its own law of development, its own cosmical life; it can be studied in no one of its parts and at no special epoch of its history. The past and the future, the near and the remote, are all blended in a system of mutual interdependence, and must be looked at together.
This is shown clearly in the past of Asia, and the present of Europe and some parts of the new world, while the history of all central Africa seems to lie wholly in the future. Heretofore it has enjoyed no progress excepting along its northern rim. The middle portion of the old world has outlived its primitive ethnographical impulse, and sunk back into a state of slumberous inaction. Asia, to call this region by its recognized name, has projected its own life from the center to the circumference; by this I mean, that while it seems to be exhausted of its old vigor, other countries inherited its power. The population of Asia is much less than it was in the time of Alexander the Great, much less than during the Mohammedan and Mongolian conquests, when all the habitable parts of that immense continent were bound together by highways of commerce and travel. On the other hand, the coasts are now of much more value and significance than they were in ancient times, and navigation has dotted her sea outline with splendid and populous cities. These seem, by reason of the facilities which steam affords, to be brought near to Europe; while the natives who inhabit central Asia are not only widely separated from the civilized world, but are divided up and set against each other by religious and political enmities of the most bitter kind. This is displayed in its fullest force by the comparative inapproachability of the great mountain chains, the Ural, the Taurus, and the Caucasus, and yet more by the unchanged barbarism of the central tribes, the hostile political relations, lacking all of the amenities and mutual dependencies of European policy, and the deadly antagonism of Mohammedanism and Christianity. This last is the curse which the natives of the earth have brought upon themselves. It is the clashing of religious faiths which has put the extinguisher on Asiatic progress, annihilated her enterprise, and set her in her present isolation. Still this barrier is not absolutely settled and for all time, but already it shows that it is capable of some modification. The politico-religious system of the Chinese is rending under our eyes; the old bonds which Mohammedanism once laid on Asia are now sensibly relaxed. The great highways of travel through the country of the Euphrates and Tigris and the extended archæological investigations of modern times have operated mediatorially between Europe and Asia; while steam navigation on the Danube has brought Turkey, a hitherto undissolved Asiatic element in European life, into closer relations with the great powers of the West. The great missionary enterprise, too, of modern times, has been laboring to remould the ideas of the Asiatic nations, while navigation has operated on the material and more appreciable interests of commerce and industry.
There are no possible limits to be assigned to the perfectibility of the globe as the abode of man; no possible bounds to his enterprise. The construction of a canal through the Isthmus of Panama would bring the eastern coast of Asia seven thousand miles nearer than it is now to the Atlantic shores of America and Europe. By saving the mere doubling of Cape Horn, one-third of the periphery of the globe would be annihilated, so far as the labor and expense of navigation are concerned. North America would nearly double its resources when its Atlantic and Pacific coasts stand in close connection and interdependence. The projected canal at Suez would exercise an unbounded influence over Asia in binding it anew to Europe. The building of highways through the passes of the Ural, the Caucasus, and Himalayas is yet to be accomplished; and only now are great roads constructing over the Rocky Mountains, welding North America together. The construction of railways on the high plateaus of central Africa will transform that vast undeveloped district, so rich in resources for the future. The changes which art is yet to effect on our globe are beyond all possible computation, and it might be said, beyond any possible exaggeration.
We turn away from these glances into the future to look upon the past, the long ages when men lived in rudeness and ignorance, having no art, and knowing nothing beyond the little tract where they were born, and to which they remained chained. There was no binding of shore to shore, and of continent to continent, through the mediatorial agency of seas and oceans. And this gave to the continents a far greater individuality than they have now, and a much higher degree of apparent influence than now when we cannot view them excepting as parts of the great complex which forms the world. The wanderings of the old nomadic races, the enlarging of the domains of culture, the transfer of the natural productions of all climes, as well as the traditional ideas of all lands, proceeded from the central portions of the ancient world toward the extremities. The manner of this progress, following as it does the order of history, displays more clearly than almost anything else the close dependence of all national development upon geographical conditions, and their indissoluble connection. Without this connection the order of historical events would have been completely changed. In no instance has there been self-evolved progress in the North, East, South, or West; it uniformly began at the geographical center, at the point of conflict between the Orient, the Occident, and the tropical South.
Western Asia, northern Africa, and southeastern Europe were the homes of the earliest culture, and it is to them that all other parts of the world owe the light which they enjoy, though they may have received it at second or third hand. The territory of which I speak extended from the highlands of India to Italy, and from the Nile to the Don, including the valleys of the Euphrates and the Gihon. This broad and fertile reach of territory has been the fruitful mother of the world’s present thought and culture. Nor must we overlook the fact that, despite what was said above, regarding the oceans as the greatest barriers to the spread of civilization, that smaller seas aided it, for the very country of which I speak was intersected by five important seas, and to them it is under immeasurable obligations for its development. This Asiatic-Africo-European belt has exercised the greatest influence on all the course of human affairs, on all colonization, on the differing of races and languages, and the arts of war and of peace, over the habitable world. This territory lies as the background of all the events of history, and has given to every one its distinctive character and its appropriate place. Nor can we in the future dispense with the element involved in this, of historical occurrences yet to come dependent on past geographical conditions, although this will be far less marked than it has been in the past. It demands and will demand a far larger measure of investigation and thought than it has yet received. Whatever independent progress the New World and Australia may seem to be making, and whatever interest they may awaken in the minds of students, not even they can be looked at without regard to their relations to the ancient historical lands, the source of all the inherited culture which they are enjoying in their vigorous youth. India, Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and other countries still stand out as the formative lands of all modern history, and we cannot study the present without studying them. They are to the student what Plutarch’s Lives are to the biographer, the imperishable and unequaled models which gain new luster as time rolls on. It is therefore not without reason that ancient geography ought to be subjected to a more systematic treatment than the geography of the Middle Ages. The latter, though not unworthy of a large place, had no relations of special importance to the whole world, to the study of the physical conditions of the most imposing objects of nature, to the connection as cause and effect of events past, present, and to come.
From these foundation principles, we advance to a more full study of the configuration of the surface of the globe, for which we are now in a measure prepared.