Utilization of Environment by Man. 129 



or war is as absolutely necessary in higher stages of growth. 

 China, a pioneer in human civilization, owes its present state 

 of fixed ideas to the isolation of vast deserts and mountain re- 

 gions. The contact of Greece with the Roman empire gave the 

 tremendous influence of Grecian art, literature and politics. 

 True, the Romans conquered Greece, but, in a far higher sense, 

 Greece conquered the whole world through her aggressors, for 

 the invading Romans not only gathered the rich fruit of the 

 little peninsula but scattered its seeds over the whole civilized 

 world. 



The plateau continent, Africa, is the most marked illustration 

 of the influence of geography on human development. Rivers 

 falling from highland to highland in cataracts make inland 

 navigation exceedingly difficult, thus isolating her tribes from 

 the outer world. 



It is a common inference that the higher the stage of civili- 

 zation, the less dependent man is on surface structure. True, 

 the path of progress is marked by overcoming and subduing 

 physical obstructions, but that does not limit the developing 

 influences of characteristic areas of surface. Utah, changed to a 

 garden by man's invention and enterprise, exerts a far stronger 

 influence than it did as a desert on the degraded savage. The 

 savage hunted over Pennsylvania, totally ignorant of the riches 

 that lay beneath his feet ; the civilized man comes and uses the 

 vast treasures to his own advantage ; but in this change we do 

 not say that he frees himself from nature; he simjjly uses natural 

 products — uses environment for a higher stage of growth. 



The river valleys once marked the lines of migration of 

 tribes and nations, of which the Danube is a notable instance. 

 Under civilized man the same river cuttings and natural exca- 

 vations are made the new pathway of the civilized world — the 

 railroad. The vast plain, to a low stage of civilization, is either 

 a hunting ground or a pasture of cattle ; in the higher stages, 

 this plain becomes a place where civilized men from all nations 

 and tribes under the sun can come together and live together, 

 melt and fuse into one great nation. Different nations have 

 gone through the wild, nomad life, the life of the fortress, and 

 have reached a stage in which isolation means decay. The for- 

 tress life hems in the intellectual and moral life, and they step 

 back to the plains of their ancestors to live together in one great 

 nation on the grandly modeled continent of North America. 



18— Nat. Geog. Mas., vol. V, 1893. 



