AND ITS INHABITANTS 151 



ance of an individual may show no apparent relation to his 

 present environment, each individual is born with the indelible 

 impress of the climatic environments through which his race 

 has passed. 



Material resources. Material resources are no less im- 

 portant than innate capacity in their effect upon civilization. 

 They are, if anything, still more closely connected with climate. 

 A Socrates with no resources except the sands of Arabia to 

 support himself and his ideas would never have been heard of. 

 Mohammed had to live in an oasis and not in the sand. His 

 religion would not today dominate nearly a seventh of man- 

 kind if it had not speedily spread to places with abundant 

 material resources. The Eskimos show the importance of 

 material resources still more clearly. Though possessing the 

 same power of passive, nerveless endurance which is character- 

 istic of the Indians, these people of the snow and ice seem to 

 have a strain of inventive ability. Their stone lamps, their 

 drills for lighting a fire by twirling one stick upon another, 

 their clever boats which make a man and his canoe parts of 

 a single watertight structure, all show the earmarks of in- 

 genious minds. Nevertheless, civilization has not made prog- 

 ress among the Eskimos. Even if they were not afflicted with 

 the inertia of the North, the absence of material resources 

 almost forbids a high civilization. Here, as in so many other 

 cases, climate is the factor which mainly determines the re- 

 sources. No crops will grow and even the reindeer does not 

 thrive In many parts of the Eskimo coasts, hence hunting is 

 the only possible mode of life. Hunters must be nomadic. 

 They cannot accumulate any large amount of the material 

 resources which are needed as aids to progress. If the white 

 man with his claims to superiority were placed in the home 

 of the Eskimos with no outside resources, would it be more 

 than a few generations before his mode of life and manner of 

 thought would be much like theirs? The retrogression of the 



