112 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
In the spirit of Ratzel and dependent on much of the data 
collected by him, Miss Semple makes an elaborate analysis of the 
potent influence of geographical factors on history. In the 
factors of environment we have, according to this author, a stable 
force yet unceasing in its operations on “ shifting, plastic, pro- 
gressive, retrogressive man.” + 
Geographic remoteness from centers of authority, as the thir- 
teen colonies from the mother country; geographical proximity 
to centers of civilization, as Greece to the Orient; natural barriers 
that protect from migrating hordes; natural highways and 
waterways that serve as arteries for the flow of commerce and 
culture between nations, — all these, she shows, make history 
dependent on geography.” Yet she grants that the analysis of 
the interplay of physical with social forces is by no means easy. 
“We see the result,” she says, “‘ but find it difficult to state the 
equation producing the result.” * Miss Semple points out how 
the land and sea sometimes co-operate, sometimes are opposed 
in influence,* and how, though each country is an independent 
whole and its history determined in large part by local geographi- 
cal conditions, it is also influenced by those as far remote as the 
downfall of Rome in relation to the gradual desiccation of 
western Asia and the Vélkerwanderung.® 
Our author wisely discriminates between the direct and indirect 
influences of the geographical environment, and shows how the 
latter are in many respects the more potent, criticizing Buckle for 
over-emphasizing the importance of awe-inspiring natural 
phenomena in their direct effect on the human mind. ‘ Moun- 
tain regions,” she says, “discourage the budding of genius 
because they are areas of isolation, confinement, remote from the 
great currents of men and ideas that move along the river valleys. 
They are regions of much labor and little leisure, of poverty today 
and anxiety for the morrow, of toil-cramped hands and toil-dulled 
brains. In the fertile alluvial plains are wealth, leisure, contact 
with many minds, large urban centers where commodities and 
ideas are exchanged. The two contrasted environments produce 
1 Influence of Geographic Environment, p. 2. 2 Ibid., pp. 3 f. 
3 Tbid., p. 14. 4 Ibid., p. 16. 5 Tbid., p. 17. 
