“... It is altogether unfair,” concludes Flint,[[55]] “to put their general enunciations [i.e., those made by Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Galen] of the principle that physical circumstances originate and modify national characteristics, on a level with Bodin’s serious, sustained, and elaborate attempt to apply it over a wide area and to a vast number of cases. Dividing nations into northern, middle, and southern,[[56]] he investigates with wonderful fulness of knowledge how climatic and geographical conditions have affected the bodily strength, the courage, the intelligence, the humanity, the chastity, and, in short, the mind, morals, and manners of their inhabitants; what influence mountains, winds, diversities of soil, &c., have exerted on individuals and societies; and he elicits a vast number of general views....”

Bodin, “der größte theoretische Politiker Frankreichs im 16. Jahrhundert,” declares Renz,[[57]] “besitzt ... das unbestreitbare Verdienst, wenn nicht die Grundgedanken und nicht ausschließlich originale Gedanken, so doch die erste weitgehende wissenschaftliche Untersuchung über den Zusammenhang zwischen umgebender Natur und Menschenwelt in neuerer Zeit auf dem Boden der Erfahrung und Wissenschaft des 16. Jahrhunderts angestellt zu haben.”

Bodin, “writing in 1577 OF THE LAWES AND CUSTOMES OF A COMMON WEALTH (English edition [translated by Richard Knowlles] 1605), contains, as Professor J. L. Myres has pointed out (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1909 [1910], p. 593), ‘the whole pith and kernel of modern anthropo-geography....’”[[58]] And Renz believes that “In der Bodinschen Behandlung der Theorie des Klimas finden sich die Anfänge der Anthropogeographie und der Ethnographie...”[[59]]

Writing in 1713, Lenglet du Fresnoy, toward the end of the sixth chapter of the first volume of his Méthode pour étudier l’histoire, expresses, decades before Montesquieu, the latter’s basic idea of the effect of social and political milieu on laws.[[60]]

In any discussion of milieu, Montesquieu is the writer most frequently mentioned, although not the most often read and quoted. He devotes the well-known five “Books,” from the fourteenth to the eighteenth, of his magnum opus, L’Esprit des Lois (1748),[[61]] to a consideration of this idea which, as has already been seen, was anything but original with him.[[62]] In Books fourteen to seventeen he treats of the relation of laws to climate, and in Book eighteen of their relation to soil. In the fourteenth[[63]] he discusses the effect of climate on the body (and mind) of individual man, in the fifteenth[[64]] on civil slavery, in the sixteenth[[65]] on domestic slavery, in the seventeenth[[66]] on political servitude, and lastly in the eighteenth[[67]] he delineates the influence of the fertility and barrenness of the soil. By climate he means little more than heat and cold. In the light of the continued high praise bestowed on him for much longer than a century, the altogether too general and dogmatic statements of these short seventy-odd pages would seem somewhat meager, so that upon their perusal one is very likely to suffer an outright disenchantment. Therefore, Flint’s judgment appears overdrawn, when he says that Montesquieu “showed on a grand scale and in the most effective way ... that, like all things properly historical, they [laws, customs, institutions] must be estimated not according to an abstract or absolute standard, but as concrete realities related to given times and places, to their determining causes and condition, and to the whole social organism to which they belong, and the whole social medium in which they subsist. Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli and Bodin, had already, indeed, inculcated this historical and political relativism; but it was Montesquieu who gained educated Europe over to the acceptance of it.”[[68]]

Turgot’s sketch of a ‘Political Geography’ shows “that he had attained to a broader view of the relationship of human development to the features of the earth and to physical agencies in general than even Montesquieu. And he saw with perfect clearness not only that many of Montesquieu’s inductions were premature and inadequate, but that there was a defect in the method by which he arrived at them.... The excellent criticism of Comte, in the fifth volume of the ‘Philosophie Positive,’ and in the fourth volume of the ‘Politique Positive,’ on this portion of Montesquieu’s speculations, is only a more elaborate reproduction of that of Turgot, and is expressed in terms which show that it was directly suggested by that of Turgot.”[[69]]

Cuvier “had not hesitated to trace the close relation borne by philosophy and art to the underlying geological formations.”[[70]]

In the teaching of a number of great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, man is “the product of environment and education” and, in their opinion, “all men were born equal and later became unequal through unequal opportunities.”[[71]]

Goethe echoed Herder’s thought when he remarked to Eckermann on the flora of a country and the disposition of its residents: “Sie haben nicht Unrecht, sagte Goethe (d. 2. April 1829), und daher kommt es denn auch, daß man der Pflanzenwelt eines Landes einen Einfluß auf die Gemütsart seiner Bewohner zugestanden hat. Und gewiß! wer sein Leben lang von hohen ernsten Eichen umgeben wäre, müßte ein anderer Mensch werden, als wer täglich unter luftigen Birken sich erginge...”[[72]] And again, when he said of environment and national character: “... so viel ist gewiß, daß außer dem Angeborenen der Rasse, sowohl Boden und Klima als Nahrung und Beschäftigung einwirkt, um den Charakter eines Volkes zu vollenden ...”[[73]] And in the following, Goethe but reiterates Herder’s oft uttered admiration for islanders and coast dwellers: “Auch von den Kräften des Meeres und der Seeluft war die Rede gewesen (d. 12. März 1828), wo denn Goethe die Meinung äußerte, daß er alle Insulaner und Meer-Anwohner des gemäßigten Klimas bei weitem für produktiver und tatkräftiger halte als die Völker im Innern großer Kontinente.”[[74]] And: “Es ist ein eigenes Ding, erwiederte Goethe (d. 12. März 1828),—liegt es in der Abstammung, liegt es im Boden, liegt es in der freien Verfassung, liegt es in der gesunden Erziehung,—genug! die Engländer überhaupt scheinen vor vielen anderen etwas voraus zu haben ...”[[75]]

Wolf and Niebuhr began to examine historical sources “nach neuen Prinzipien des Eingetauchtseins in eine bestimmte seelische Umwelt, in ein klargezeichnetes zeitgenössisches Milieu.”[[76]]