E.— GEOGRAPHY 109 



great educational advantage that they deal definitely with man rather than 

 with lower forms of life or with physical phenomena. A disadvantage 

 inherent in geography and allied subjects is the immense number oi facts 

 whose assimilation would seem to be necessary in the study. This is 

 wearisome in a scheme making for an all-round education, and in my 

 opinion memorising facts should never be the vital factor in geography. 



You may have heard of the despondent negro preacher who complained 

 that his flock was either so ignorant that they believed too much in ' de 

 deuce, ^ or so sophisticated that they doubted everything. Students of 

 cultural geography should also learn to ' doubt and deduce,' rather than 

 to memorise the innumerable facts often presented without coordination. 

 It is this training in deduction, accompanied by a healthy scepticism of 

 orthodox dogmas until they have been tested and confirmed, which should 

 be our aim. 



C I. Evolution of Life and Culture. 



To the geographer interested in culture-spreads, it seems likely that 

 the one outstanding fact has often been neglected by sociologists. It 

 should be clear that as long as man was controlled primarily by the same 

 factors as the higher mammals his evolution is likely to proceed along 

 somewhat similar lines. We shall find in many fields of research that 

 we are dealing with the same phenomena, i.e. with progressive stages of 

 evolution developing in the Old World ' cradle.' This concept can be 

 illustrated in Mammals, Human Race and Human Culture alike. 



Matthew has shown that the cradleland and stages of evolution for 

 various related groups of the higher mammals can be deduced wholly from 

 their distribution in time and space (Matthew 1915). In Fig. 5 at B, I 

 have summarised his conclusions in a block diagram, which shows that 

 we are dealing with a typical example of what I describe later as the 

 ' Zones and Strata ' phenomena. Here is illustrated the problem of the 

 vast biological changes involved in changing something like an antelope 

 into a sheep. Needless to say millions of years have elapsed while this 

 occurred. But the salient control was the marked environmental stimulus 

 centred in south-central Asia. 



There is no reason to doubt that these special conditions continued to 

 operate in this region from early Tertiary times up to the development 

 of the first stable civilised communities of man — say, around 10,000 B.C. 

 If we grant this postulate, then it would seem obvious that the variations 

 in the human species (i.e. racial groups) would almost inevitably arise in 

 the same region of great stimulus. These might be expected to develop 

 in a much shorter period, say of the order of half a million years. The 

 writer has demonstrated this thesis in many books and papers. 



Finally, major culture-changes are also essentially responses to environ- 

 ment — though far more rapid than biological changes. There is, to 

 the writer, no region more likely than south central Asia where the 

 tremendous development from the nomadic hunter to settled village- 

 dweller was so likely to occur. I pointed out this inherent geographical 

 advantage nearly twenty years ago ; and since that time I have watched 

 the students of culture driven from Egypt to Mesopotamia, and finally to 



