rEBEUART 19j 1915] 



SCIENCE 



265 



Lester F. Ward is equally confident that 



There lias teen no important organic change in 

 man during historic time.i* 



Our individual also embodies physiolog- 

 ical and psychical activities which are af- 

 fected by environment. Here the problem 

 is immensely involved, for, as Brinton says, 

 psychical development depends less on nat- 

 ural surroundings than on a plexus of re- 

 lations of each man with many others. 



Natural environment includes first the 

 physical — soil, water, minerals, land form, 

 temperature, moisture in the air, light, elec- 

 tricity, and all operative on an earth in 

 interplanetary relation to the sun. Then is 

 added the animal and plant environment 

 whose daily pressure on the individual and 

 the group has held in no small way the des- 

 tinies of civilization. Interwrought with 

 all these natural forces are the human-social 

 factors ever more powerful since the dawn 

 of history. Thus there is a total of infi- 

 nitely variable factors producing infinitely 

 diverse results upon the body and mind. 



The environment of this day and hour 

 is perplexing enough, but environments 

 change: man exchanges one environment 

 for another. The steady drive of our en- 

 vironment in its daily flux is replaced by 

 the shock of a new environment entered in 

 a day or a night or gained by long voyages 

 across the sea. The sum of a man's hered- 

 ity goes out into his new sphere with him. 

 But how much of this is primal and per- 

 sistent and how much can be shifted like a 

 garment? The heredity doctors have not 

 answered this question and geographers 

 should have a care. It is a wholesome cor- 

 rective to remember the number of our pos- 

 sible ancestors. According to Boas,^^ an 

 Eskimo could not have so many as you or I. 

 Royal families share this limitation with 



i*L. F. Ward, "Pure Sociology," 17. 

 15 F. Boas, "The Mind of Primitive Man," 

 84-88. 



the polar man, and one European monarch, 

 it is said, has in the past twelve generations 

 only the meager oufit of 533 ancestors out 

 of a theoretical 4,096. We, however, be- 

 longing to a large population of unstable 

 habits might have in twenty generations 

 more than a million each. We are too com- 

 plex to come to an easy reckoning about 

 ourselves. 



By our social memory we carry the old 

 environment into the new, and thus we 

 " compound "^^ environments, and this ends 

 in making environment coextensive with 

 the world. The universality of modem en- 

 vironment for any civilized man appears in 

 our commercial interchange and speaks to 

 us in a war whose center is in Europe, 

 whose circle takes in the world. 



Ratzel in showing how Christianity con- 

 quered its realm not as direct from Pales- 

 tine, but as modified on its way through 

 Egypt, Greece and Rome, has given us a 

 good example of such compounding of en- 

 vironments." Geographers have by no 

 means been blind to the difficulty of an- 

 thropic problems. Brunhes warns us that 

 truth in geographic relations of man is ap- 

 proximate, and that to claim it as exact is 

 to be unscientific.^^ 



The outstanding psychological fact then is the 

 antithesis of a rigid fatalistic determination of 

 human acts by climate and soil.is 



And he then cites what he calls "antin- 

 omies," frontier, urban, racial and social. 

 Ratzel has a most instructive passage on 

 sources of error due to the neglect of middle 

 members lying between visible workings 

 and their remote causes, the inclination to 

 take a direct line instead of the rounda- 

 bout way of mediate working causes. This 



i^E. E. Marett, "Anthropology," 122-23. 

 1^ "Anthropogeographie, " I., 175. 



18 J. Brunhes, Inaugural lecture, Scot. Geog. 

 Mag., 29, 362-63. 



19 lUa., 367. 



