I have placed the geographic features which favour or impede intercommunication first on the list of those which modify the ethnic mind; and designedly so.
In the philosophic study of human development the social and anti-social factors demand our first attention. A man becomes man only as one of many. Nothing so lames progress as isolation; nothing so hastens it as good company; and I am fain to endorse the proverb that bad company is better than none. Rapid transportation is the key to the phenomenal growth of the nineteenth century: transportation of weight by steam, of thought by electricity. The Romans knew the value of good roads and made the best which have ever been constructed; the Phœnicians and Greeks won their pre-eminence, not by the resources of their home provinces, but by their skill as sailors.
The Soil.—Next and second in deciding the history and character of a people comes the nature of the soil, the earth, on which they live.
Its value is to them in what it yields, either spontaneously or by labour. The primitive man contented himself with the former; but culture came along when toil entered. For culture ever demands an effort greater than that immediately necessary for existence, because its aim, from first to last, is directed to the future; and the higher the culture, the more distant is that future.
Even the earliest men levied tribute on all the realms of nature. The cave-dwellers of the Gironde caught fishes and trapped beasts; they gathered nuts and edible roots; and they sought diligently for the stones best adapted to lance-points and scrapers. All this we know from the remains left in their rock-shelters. They utilised the soil to the full extent of their knowledge and wants.
The wealth they thus amassed was scanty and transitory; but when their successors, the neolithic peoples, appeared with domesticated animals, an agriculture, a beginning of sedentary life and city building, and, ere long, devised the excavation of ores wherewith to fashion weapons of bronze, the land areas suitable for these occupations soon became the centres of ethnic life and property.
I need not pursue the story of the growth of these prime industries: the cultivation of the soil, the domestication of animals, the exploitation of mines, the transformation from a wandering to a sedentary life, from vagabondage to the hallowed associations of a home, and the effects which these changes wrought on the sentiments and intellects of tribes.
What I wish particularly to point out is that what man asks from the soil is primarily nutrition,—only nutrition, a living. It is the “food-quest” which has been so vividly portrayed in American primitive life by Mindeleff and so fully set forth by Mason: the tribe enslaved by the soil; its laws, religion, customs, hopes, and fears wrapped up and submerged in the desperate strife for food. Only where there is a surplus, where wealth rises above want, is it possible for the group to free itself from this bondage to the clod,—to become more than an “adscript of the glebe.”
The relations between man and the fauna and flora of the region he inhabits are constant and intimate. The progress of civilisation has been traced by Pickering and others in the distribution of plants cultivated by man for his food, use, or pleasure. They have been rightly named by Gerland “the levers of his elevation.” Especially the cereals supplied him a regular, appropriate, and sufficient nutrition. Their product was not perishable, like fruit, but could be stored against the season of cold and want. Their cultivation led to a sedentary life, to the clearing and tillage of the soil, to its irrigation, and to the study of the seasons and their changes.
The grain, once harvested, still required preparation to become an acceptable article of food. It must be soaked or crushed and in some way cooked. These processes stimulated inventive ingenuity, encouraged regular labour, and required specialisation of employment.