Friedrich Düsel[[9]] renders milieu by eighteen (18) German words.

In Unsere Umgangssprache,[[10]] milieu is translated into German by forty-six (46) words and phrases.

Claude Bernard, the celebrated French physiologist, differentiates between inner and outer milieu:[[11]] “Je crois ..., avoir le premier insisté sur cette idée qu’il y a pour l’animal réellement deux milieux: un milieu extérieur dans lequel est placé l’organisme et un milieu intérieur dans lequel vivent les éléments des tissus....” Probably as a result, we have today “micro-milieu” in micro-biology.

According to Jean Finot,[[12]] milieu “includes the sum total of the conditions which accompany the conception and earthly existence of a being, and which end only with its death.”

The term milieu was introduced by Herbert Spencer into English literature as “environment,” says Martin Schütze.[[13]] Although Carlyle employed the term “environment” as early as 1827,[[14]] nevertheless, the fact that the term is generally current, is undoubtedly attributable in the first place to Spencer.

The word “Umwelt” is quoted by J. H. Campe,[[15]] who believed himself to have been the coiner of the term; five years later (1816) Goethe used it at the beginning of his “Italienische Reise.”[[16]]

The painstaking and scholarly German lexicographer, Daniel Sanders, who seldom fails to give his reader some reliable suggestion, refers in his Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache[[17]] (which despite the contributions of recent scholarship still remains a great work) to a passage in the poetical works of the Danish writer Baggesen (2, 102) in which the word “Umwelt” is employed. This passage occurs in the elegy entitled “Napoleon” addressed to Voß and written in 1800.[[18]] Baggesen, then, made use of “Umwelt” a decade before Campe.

Its Italian equivalent is “ambiente,” which is noted here only because of the French “l’ambiance” and the English “ambient” and “circumambiency.”

I
A Sketch of the History of the Idea of Milieu Down to the Nineteenth Century

Recorded mesologic[[19]] thinking begins with the ancient Jewish Prophets whose striking aperçus concerning the providential correspondence between the configuration of the surface of the earth and the destiny of nations, concerning the connection between “Landesnatur” and “Volkscharakter,” etc., anticipated[[20]] a number of great thoughts of later anthropo-geographers.