Extensive plains unfavorable to early development.
The level or undulating surface of extensive lowlands is not favorable to the early development of civilization. Not only do their wide extent and absence of barriers postpone the transition from nomadism to sedentary life, but their lack of contrasting environments and contrasted developments, which supplement and stimulate, puts chains upon progress. A flat, monotonous relief produces a monotonous existence, necessarily one-sided, needing a complement in upland or mountain. To the pioneer settlers in the lowlands of Missouri the Ozark Plateau was a boon, because its streams furnished water-power for much needed saw and flour mills. Treeless Egypt even before 2500 B. C. depended upon the cedars of the Lebanon Mountains for the construction of its ships; so that the conquest of Lebanon, begun by Thutmose I. and completed by Thutmose III. in about 1470 B. C., had a sound geographical basis.[1033] Similarly the exploitation of the copper, malachite, turquoise and lapis-lazuli of Mount Sinai, minerals not found in the Nile plain, led the ancient Egyptians into extensive mining operations there before 3000 B. C., and resulted in the establishment of Egyptian political supremacy in 2900 B. C., as a measure to protect the mines against the depredations of the neighboring Bedouin tribes.[1034] Lowlands lack the distinctive advantages of highlands found in diversity of climate, water-power, generally in more abundant forests and minerals. The latter are earlier discovered and worked in the tilted strata of mountains and uplands.
Plain countries suffer particularly from a paucity of varied geographic conditions and of resulting contrasts in their population. Their national characters tend to be less richly endowed; their possibilities for development are blighted or retarded, because even racial differences are rapidly obliterated in the uniform geographic environment, A small diversified country like Crete, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, Saxony, or Japan, is a geographical multum in parvo. The western half of Europe bears the same stamp, endowing each country and nation with marked individuality born of partial isolation and a varied combination of environment. The larger eastern half of the continent embraced in the plains of Poland and Russia shows monotony in every aspect of human life. This comes out anthropologically in the striking similarity of head-form found everywhere north and east of the Carpathian Mountains, except in the secluded districts of Lithuania and Crimea, which shelter remnants of distinct races. Over all this vast territory the range of cephalic variation is only five units or one-third that in the restricted but diversified territory of western Europe. Italy, only one-eighteenth the size of European Russia, has a range of fifteen units, reflecting in the variety of its human types the diversity of its environment.[1035]
Conditions for fusion in plains.
In the plains geography makes for fusion. Russia shows this marked homogeneity, despite a motley collection of race ingredients which have entered into the make-up of the Russian people. Without boundary or barrier, the country has stood wide open to invasion; but the intruders found no secluded corners where they could entrench themselves and preserve their national individuality.[1036] They dropped into a vast melting-pot, which has succeeded in amalgamating the most diverse elements. The long-drawn Baltic-North Sea plain of Europe shows the same power to fuse. Here is found a prevailing blond, long-headed stock from the Gulf of Finland to the Somme River in France.[1037] Yet this natural boulevard has been a passway for races. Prehistoric evidences show that the dark, broad-headed Celtic folk once overspread this plain east to the Weser;[1038] it still tends to trickle down from the southern uplands into the Baltic lowland, and modify the Teutonic type along its southern margin throughout Germany.[1039] The Slavs in historic times reached as far west as the Weser, while the expansion of the Teutons has embraced the whole maritime plain from Brittany to the Finnish Gulf. Here it is difficult to draw an ethnic boundary on the basis of physical differences. The eastern Prussians are Slavonized Teutons, and the adjacent Poles seem to be Teutonized Slavs, while the purest type of Letto-Lithuanian at the eastern corner of the Baltic coast approximates closely to the Anglo-Saxon type which sprang from the western corner.[1040] A similar amalgamation of races and peoples has taken place in the lowlands of England and Scotland, while diversity still lingers in the highlands. In the Lowlands of Scotland, Picts in small numbers, Britons, Scots from Ireland, Angles, Frisians, Northmen and Danes have all been blended and assimilated in habits, customs and speech.[1041]
Retardation due to monotonous environment.
This uniformity is advantageous to early development in a small plain, because of the juxtaposition of contrasted environments, but is stultifying to national life in an immense expanse of monotony like that of Russia. Here sameness leaves its stamp on everything. Language is differentiated with only two dialects, that of the Great Russians of the north and the Little Russians of the southern steppes, who were so long exposed to Tartar influences. Most other languages of Europe, though confined to much smaller areas, show far greater diversity.[1042] While the Russian of Kazan or Archangel can converse readily with the citizen of Riga or St. Petersburg, Germans from highland Bavaria and Swabia are scarcely intelligible to Prussian and Mecklenberger. And whereas Germany a few decades ago could count over a hundred different kinds of national dress or Tracht, Great Russia alone, with six times the area, had only a single type with perhaps a dozen slight variations. Leroy-Beaulieu comments upon this eternal sameness. "The cities are all alike; so are the peasants, in looks, habits, in mode of life. In no country do people resemble one another more; no other country is so free from political complexity, those oppositions in type and character, which even yet we encounter in Italy and Spain, in France and Germany. The nation is made in the likeness of the country; it shows the same unity, we might say the same monotony, as the plains on which it dwells."
Influence of soils in low plains.