96 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



geographers are agreed that man's intelligence and power of acquiring 

 and transmitting knowledge so differentiate him from animals that it 

 is necessary to distinguish between human geography and animal geo- 

 graphy ; yet, so far as I am aware, little detailed consideration has been 

 given to the question as to the respects in which his response to 

 environmental conditions differs from that of the animals. This is 

 unfortunate, more especially since, thanks to the biologists, we have 

 a fairly clear idea as to the mechanism of the response in the latter 

 case. 



If, for example, we take two familiar animals, such as the rabbit 

 and the common hare, we find that, though belonging to the same 

 genus, and generally resembling each other in structure, they show 

 certain minor differences in bodily form and habits fitting them for the 

 environments in which they respectively live. Thus the long legs of 

 the hare' enable it to maintain the swift movements upon which it 

 depends for escape from its foes, while the rabbit, ijihabiting sandy 

 uplands instead of open country, finds safety underground, and need 

 only be able to move swiftly over short distances. Similarly, 

 the young of the rabbit, born within the shelter of the burrow, are more 

 helpless than the leverets, brought forth virtually in the open. 

 The biologists are broadly agreed that these differences are an adaptive 

 response to the different environments of the two animals. In 

 explaining the origin of that adaptive response, most of them lay stress 

 on the two factors of fixation to a particular environment and isolation — 

 actual or physiological — within it, so that incipient variations are not 

 swamped by intercrossing. 



Now when we turn to look at man, two facts are at once apparent. 

 In the first place, at the present time, he does not appear to respond 

 to environmental influences by adaptive modifications of bodily form. 

 Secondly, there was certainly a time, before he had come fully to his 

 heritage, when he did so respond. We know this because the anthro- 

 pologists are agreed that while man once ran into a number of species — 

 and of genera — now all living human beings belong to the same species, 

 and even the races show marked signs of being in process of becoming 

 swamped by intercrossing. In other words, there was a time when 

 there was no human geography, when man reacted to the sum total of 

 the conditions as an animal does ; but that time appears to have largely 

 passed. 



But there is ceiiainly still a human response to environmental 

 conditions. What precise form does it take? To a certain minor 

 extent, apparently as an inheritance from what T regard as essentially 

 the pre-human period, there is a direct structural response. One need 

 only mention the presence of peoples with thin, almost mipigmented 

 skins in Western Europe, and the tendency to increased pigmentation 

 alike as the Tropics and the Poles are approached. But though deter- 

 mined efforts have been made to correlate in detail the physical 

 characters, of the great races with the climate and relief of the areas 

 where they are presumed to have originated, most of these correlations 

 remain uncertain and speculative. 



Man's real response to the surface phenomena of the earth takes 

 the forni of a communal, not an individual response. It is the aptitudes 



