THE HOTTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD IS INHABITED BY MAN
No climate has triumphed over the endurance of man. Massowah, the most important town in the Italian Colony of Eritrea, in North Africa, is the hottest place in the world, but, like the coldest known place, it is inhabited.
Nature and National Destiny
The boundaries of natural regions are always natural boundaries. Although this delicate subject may be left to political geography, it is by no means to be neglected by those who are interested in history, boundary questions being among the most frequent causes of wars. In addition, boundaries are the necessary result of historical movements. In case two states strive against each other in expanding, the motion of both is impeded, and the boundary lies where the movement comes to a halt. It is in the nature of things that growing states are very frequently contiguous to uninhabited regions, not to other states. This contiguity is always a source of natural boundaries. The most natural of all arise from adjacency to uninhabitable regions: first the uninhabitable lands, then the sea. The boundary at the edge of the uninhabitable world is the safest; for there is nothing beyond. The broad Arctic frontiers of Russia are a great source of power. A high mountain range, also, may separate inhabited regions—which are always State territory—by an uninhabited strip of land. After all, the sea, marshes, rivers even, are uninhabitable zones. But traffic brings connection with it, and the Rhine, which to the Romans was a moat, especially well adapted as a defence, is now, with its thirty railway bridges and thousands of vessels plying up and down and across, far more of a highway and a means of communication than a dividing line.
The position, form, and movements of the earth seem far enough removed from the deeds and destinies of peoples, yet the more we contemplate the latter, the more we are led to consider the earth’s inclination to its axis, its approximately spherical form, and its motion, which, combined, are the cause of the recurrence in fixed order of day and night, summer and winter.
INHABITANTS OF THE COLDEST PLACE IN THE WORLD
Man is the most adaptable of living creatures. There is no climate in the world in which he cannot live. The lowest temperatures taken have been at Verkhoyansk, in Siberia, but the place is inhabited by people, of whom we give a group.
The effects of these great earthly phenomena are differently felt in every country; for they vary according to geographical location. Practically, that which most conforms to any given situation north or south of the equator is the climate of a land. Day and night are of more even length at the equator than in our country; but beyond the Polar circles there are days that last for months, and nights equally long. Scarcely any annual variation in temperature is known to the inhabitants of Java, while in Eastern Siberia Januarys of fifty degrees below freezing-point and Julys of twenty degrees above zero of Centigrade, winters during which the mercury freezes, and summers of oppressive sultriness, are contrasted with one another.