Hellwald, “the well-known traveller and geographer,” compiled his “History of Civilization in its Natural Development” in 1874, according to the findings of which, cultural development is “a natural process, conditioned by race, geography, and climate. Civilisation means the mastering of nature and the taming of man.... Hellwald’s standpoint is shared, though less aggressively displayed by Henne-am-Rhyn.”[[261]]
To the late meteorologist Cleveland Abbe, “Everything seems to combine to prove that the existing order of events both material and intellectual has been brought about by a slow process of change, due to the interaction of the atoms and masses that constitute the material world around us.”[[262]]
The great diversity of existent civilizations, declares Auguste Matteuzzi, is due to the diversity of the milieus where they developed. In order to discover why any civilization becomes more heterogeneous and more perfect, one must study the geographic milieu where it evolved. The organic and inorganic milieu of evolving ethnic groups constrains human societies to an incessant process of adaptation, and these societies in their turn react upon the milieu and modify it.[[263]]
In short, says Auguste Comte, “all human progress, political, moral, or intellectual, is inseparable from material progression, in virtue of the close interconnection which, as we have seen, characterizes the natural course of social phenomena.”[[264]]
That civilization is a result of adaptation to environment, physical as well as political, is the view entertained by Bryce, Strachey, and Geikie.[[265]]
Climate and Man’s Characteristics
There are “certain broad, distinguishing characteristics of man in the temperate and tropical zones, in determining which it is reasonable to believe that climate has played a part. Similarly, there has been a natural tendency to attribute certain differences between northerners and southerners in the temperate zones to a difference in climate.... These national differences are proverbial between northern and southern Germans, French, Spanish, Russians, Italians, Arabs, and other peoples. The influence of climate has likewise been traced in the sad, even pessimistic tone of much of the northern literature, and in the gravity and melancholy of modern northern music, as well as of the older northern folk-songs ... even racial distinctions are more or less directly traceable, in many instances, to climate.... Sir Archibald Geikie, in his Scottish Reminiscences, has emphasized the climatic influence in producing the grim character of the Scot....”[[266]]
Tacitus, in the 29th chapter of the Germania, assures us that the soil and climate of the land of the Mattiaci caused them to be more bellicose than their neighbors.[[267]]
Daudet, “who has written an entire novel (‘Numa Roumestan’) to depict the great influence of the climate of southern Europe upon conduct, says: ‘The Southerner does not love strong drinks; he is intoxicated by nature. Sun and wind distil in him a terrible natural alcohol to whose influence every one born under this sky is subject. Some have only the mild fever which sets their speech and gesture free, redoubles their audacity, makes everything seem rosy-hued, and drives them on to boasting; others live in a blind delirium. And what Southerner has not felt the sudden giving way, the exhaustion of his whole being, that follows an outburst of rage or enthusiasm?’”[[268]]
Draper “emphasized the important historical consequences of the difference in the characteristics of northerners and southerners in the United States, which he attributed largely to climate, and which found expression in the Civil War.... The Boers in Africa have developed along lines different from those of the Dutch in the United States.”[[269]]