282 FARABEE— THE SOUTH AMERICAN INDIAN. 



certain that the habitat with all the geographic factors which have 

 produced those characters is inherited. If the effect of environ- 

 ment is upon the individual and does not become permanently fixed 

 in the race and if it acts only as an inhibitor in the development of 

 characteristics it has the force of an inheritance because it never 

 ceases to operate. Hence the race develops true to the environ- 

 ment. Primitive man must have originated in a tropical but not a 

 jungle country where the environment made little demand upon his 

 growing intellect. The search for food probably took him tem- 

 porarily outside of his first habitat. After a time the pressure of 

 numbers would prevent his return. His customs and habits would 

 change to meet the new conditions. So, no doubt, he has slowly 

 moved through the long period of his history, from one stage to 

 another, from one environment to another, and from one develop- 

 ment to another. These developments were not necessarily from a 

 lower to a higher plane. He had little choice; the quest for food 

 or the pressure from numbers either called or drove him onward 

 from the old to newer fields. He followed the animals and may 

 have learned from them to build his shelter and to store his food 

 against a future need. Necessity developed forethought and made 

 him an inventor. The forces of nature were first feared and then 

 followed. He became as mobile as the wind and the water by whose 

 aid he traveled. After he had thus occupied the habitable globe 

 each section continued to develop a culture, peculiar to its own 

 environment. Every geographical factor had its influence in this 

 development. Sea and bay, lake and river, mountain and valley, 

 forest and desert, temperature and humidity, wind and rain, sun- 

 shine and cloud, each and all had their effect in isolating or uniting, 

 separating or deflecting, expanding or confining, the migrating 

 peoples and in determining their physical development, their forms 

 of culture, their economic and political organization. Man has fol- 

 lowed no plan, has had no standards. Whatever advancement he 

 has made has been by chance rather than by choice, by accident 

 rather than by conscious direction. 



In the migration of man from his original home probably in 

 southern Asia, by way of Behring Strait and North America to the 

 tropics again he completed the cycle of climatic conditions. His 



