Miss Ellen Churchill Semple, Kentucky's distinguished anthropo-geographer, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1863. Vassar College conferred the degree of Bachelor of Arts upon her in 1882, and the Master of Arts in 1891. She then studied for two years at the University of Leipzig. Miss Semple has devoted herself to the new science of anthropo-geography, which is the study of the influence of geographic conditions upon the development of mankind. Since 1897 she has contributed articles upon her subject to the New York Journal of Geography, the London Geographical Journal, and to other scientific publications. Miss Semple's first book, entitled American History and Its Geographic Conditions (Boston, 1903), proclaimed her as the foremost student of the new science in the United States. A special edition of this work was published for the Indiana State Teachers' Association, which is said to be the largest reading circle in the world. In 1901 Miss Semple prepared an interesting study of The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains, which was issued in 1910 as a bulletin of the American Geographical Society. Miss Semple's latest work is an enormous volume, entitled Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography (New York, 1911). This required seven long years of untiring research to prepare, and with its publication she came into her own position, which is quite unique in the whole range of American literature. Although scientific to the last degree, her writings have the real literary flavor, which is seldom found in such work. Miss Semple lectured at Oxford University in 1912, and in the late autumn of that year she discussed Japan, in which country she had experienced much of value and interest, before the Royal British Geographical Society in London, and later before the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Edinburgh. Between various lectures in Scotland and England she continued her researches in the London libraries, returning to the United States as the year closed.
Bibliography. The Nation (December 31, 1903); Political Science Quarterly (September, 1904).
MAN A PRODUCT OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE[36]
[From Influences of Geographic Environment (New York, 1911)]
Man is a product of the earth's surface. This means not merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust; but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of navigation or irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution. She has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. On the mountains she has given him leg muscles of iron to climb the slope; along the coast she has left these weak and flabby, but given him instead vigorous development of chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar. In the river valley she attaches him to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas and ambitions by a dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of his farm. Up on the windswept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herds gives him leisure for contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert, and the grass of the steppe, stretching on and on without break or change. Chewing over and over the cud of his simple belief as the one food of his unfed mind, his faith becomes fanaticism; his big spacial ideas, born of that ceaseless regular wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests.
Man can no more be scientifically studied apart from the ground which he tills, or the lands over which he travels, or the seas over which he trades, than polar bear or desert cactus can be understood apart from its habitat. Man's relation to his environment are infinitely more numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or animal. So complex are they that they constitute a legitimate and necessary object of special study. The investigation which they receive in anthropology, ethnology, sociology and history is piecemeal and partial, limited as to the race, cultural development, epoch, country or variety of geographic conditions taken into account. Hence all these sciences, together with history so far as history undertakes to explain the causes of events, fail to reach a satisfactory solution of their problems, largely because the geographic factor which enters into them all has not been thoroughly analyzed. Man has been so noisy about the way he has "conquered Nature," and Nature has been so silent in her persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the equation of human development has been overlooked.
[MRS. ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON]
Mrs. Annie Fellows Johnston, creator of the famous "Little Colonel Series," was born at Evansville, Indiana, May 15, 1863, the daughter of a clergyman. Miss Fellows was educated in the public schools of Evansville, and then spent the year of 1881-1882 at the State University of Iowa. She was married at Evansville, in 1888, to William L. Johnston, who died four years later, leaving her a son and daughter. Mrs. Johnston's first arrival in Kentucky as a resident (though not as a visitor), was in 1898, and then she stayed only three years. Her son's quest of health led her first to Walton, New York, then to Arizona, where they spent a winter on the desert in sight of Camelback mountain, which suggested the legend of In the Desert of Waiting. From Arizona they went to California and then, in 1903, decided to try the climate of Texas, up in the hill country, north of San Antonio. Mrs. Johnston called her home "Penacres," and she lived there until her son's death in the fall of 1910. She and her daughter returned to Pewee Valley, Kentucky, in April, 1911, and purchased "The Beeches," the old home of Mrs. Henry W. Lawton, the widow of the famous American general. The house is situated in a six acre grove of magnificent beech-trees, and is a place often mentioned in "The Little Colonel" stories. Mrs. Johnston's books are: Big Brother (Boston, 1893); The Little Colonel (Boston, 1895); Joel: A Boy of Galilee (Boston, 1895; Italian translation, 1900); In League with Israel (Cincinnati, 1896), the second and last of Mrs. Johnston's books that was not issued by L. C. Page and Company, Boston; Ole Mammy's Torment (1897); Songs Ysame (1897), a book of poems, written with her sister, Mrs. Albion Fellows Bacon, the social reformer of Evansville, Indiana; The Gate of the Giant Scissors (1898); Two Little Knights of Kentucky (1899), written in Kentucky; The Little Colonel's House Party (1900); The Little Colonel's Holidays (1901); The Little Colonel's Hero (1902); Cicely (1902); Asa Holmes, or At the Crossroads (1902); Flip's Islands of Providence (1903); The Little Colonel at Boarding-School (1903), the children's "Order of Hildegarde" was founded on the story of The Three Weavers in this volume; The Little Colonel in Arizona (1904); The Quilt that Jack Built (1904); The Colonel's Christmas Vacation (1905); In the Desert of Waiting (1905; Japanese translation, Tokio, 1906); The Three Weavers (1905), a special edition of this famous story; Mildred's Inheritance (1906); The Little Colonel, Maid of Honor (1906); The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding (1907); Mary Ware (1908); The Legend of the Bleeding Heart (1908); Keeping Tryst (1908); The Rescue of the Princess Winsome (1908); The Jester's Sword (1909; Japanese translation, Tokio, 1910); The Little Colonel's Good Times Book (1909); Mary Ware in Texas (1910); and Travellers Five (1911), a collection of short-stories for grown people, previously published in magazines, with a foreword by Bliss Carman. The little Kentucky girl—called the "Little Colonel" because of her resemblance to a Southern gentleman of the old school—has had Mrs. Johnston's attention for seventeen years, and she has recently announced that she is at work upon the twelfth and final volume of the "Little Colonel Series," as she feels that work for grown-ups is more worth her while. This last story of the series was published in the fall of 1912, entitled Mary Ware's Promised Land; and needless to say her "promised land" is Kentucky. There are "Little Colonel Clubs" all over the world, as Mrs. Johnston has learned from thousands of letters from children, and when she rings down the curtain upon her heroine many girls and boys in this and other countries will be sad.
Bibliography. Current Literature (April, 1901); The Century (September, 1903).