[128]. Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1909 (1910), p. 593.
Buffon.
Buffon followed Hippocrates. Man, said Buffon, consists of a single species. Individual variations are due to three causes—climate, food, and habits. These influences, acting over large areas on large groups of people, produce general and constant varieties. To these varieties he gave the name of race. This doctrine was the main support of the monogenists.
Alexander von Humboldt, Ritter, and Waitz.
The year 1859 marks a crisis in this field of research, as in so many others. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the Prussian naturalist and traveller, spent the later part of his life in writing his classic Kosmos, a summary and exposition of the laws and conditions of the physical universe. Karl Ritter (1779-1859), Professor of Geography at the University of Berlin, published, between 1822 and his death, the ten volumes of Die Erdkunde im Verhältniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen. These works formed the basis from which was developed the German view of geography as a science of the co-relation of distribution. In 1859 Waitz, in his Anthropologie der Naturvölker, insisted on the inter-relation between the physical organisation and the psychic life of mankind.
Buckle.
Between 1857 and 1861 appeared Buckle’s History of Civilisation, in which the influence of environment on mankind is strongly emphasised. “To one of these four classes (Climate, Food, Soil, and the General Aspect of Nature) may be referred all the external phenomena by which Man has been permanently affected.”[[129]] The recognition of the environmental influence has long been a characteristic of the French school. Ripley (1900, p. 4) points out that, wherever the choice lies between heredity and environment, the French almost always prefer the latter as the explanation of the phenomenon. This is seen from the time of Bodin (1530-1596) and Montesquieu (1689-1755), with their objective explanations of philosophy, and Cuvier, who traced the close relationship between philosophy and geological formation, to Turquan (1896), who mapped out the awards made by the Paris Salon, showing the coincidence of the birth-place of the artists with the fertile river basins.
[129]. L.c., chap. ii.
Ratzel. Reclus.
In Germany the exponents of these theories were Cotta and Kohl, and later Peschel, Kirchhoff, Bastian, and Gerland; but the greatest name of all is that of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), who has written the standard work on Anthropo-Geographie (1882-91). Another monumental work is that by Élisée Reclus (1820-1905), Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (1879-1894).