George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 259-261. New York, 1897.
Isabella Bird Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbors, pp. 21, 134-135, 140, 142. New York, 1897.
Article Waldenses, Encyclopædia Britannica.
Chapter XVII—The Influence Of Climate
Importance of climatic influences.
Climate enters fundamentally into all consideration of geographic influences, either by implication or explicitly. It is a factor in most physiological and psychological effects of environment. It underlies the whole significance of zonal location, continental and insular. Large territorial areas are favorable to improved variation in men and animals partly because they comprise a diversity of natural conditions, of which a wide range of climates forms one. This is also one advantage of a varied relief, especially in the Tropics, where all the zones may be compressed into a small area on the slopes of high mountains like the Andes and Kilimanjaro. Climate fixes the boundaries of human habitation in Arctic latitudes and high altitudes by drawing the dead-line to all organic life. It dominates life in steppes and torrid deserts as in sub-polar wastes. It encourages intimacy with the sea in tropical Malays and Polynesians, and like a slave-driver, scourges on the fur-clad Eskimo to reap the harvest of the deep. It is always present in that intricate balance of geographic factors which produces a given historical result, throwing its weight now into one side of the scales, now into the other. It underlies the production, distribution and exchange of commodities derived from the vegetable and animal kingdoms, influences methods of agriculture, and the efficiency of human labor in various industries.[1409] Hence it is a potent factor in the beginning and in the evolution of civilization, so far as this goes hand in hand with economic development.