INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT UPON HUMAN INDUSTRIES. (141 



minutest phases of our industrial life spring-. By a simple diagram 

 (see plate) this action of the sun and interaction of earth strata may 

 be shown. The ancients divided phenomena into those of earth, water, 

 air, fire — not a bad division Avhen we are considering the influence of 

 environment on human actions. 



The terrestrial fires are responsible for the corrugations on the earth's 

 crust. The solar fires, in cooperation with the moon and the earth's mo- 

 tions and its inclination in its orbit are responsible for the movements 

 of the waters and the air in tides and climate and all the marvelous 

 changes included in that word. The waters of the earth preserve tol- 

 erably well the spheroidal form, and the winds and climates of the seas 

 conform to the simple laws of spherical motion under given conditions. 

 The lands projecting from the seas by their elevations and conforma- 

 tions modify the movements of the air and the waters so as to re-create 

 themselves. The winds of the Atlantic, saturated with moisture, sliding 

 westward as the earth spins eastward at the rate of a thousand miles an 

 hour, strike against the mountain barrier of the two Americas. Their 

 waters are precipitated in deluges on the lowlands and blizzards of 

 snow on the high mountains. This provokes the action of disintegrat- 

 ing frosts, of avalauches, of glaciers, of torrents, of rank vegetation to 

 break down the mountains and form the continents eastward. On the 

 contrary, west of this vast upheaval the winds from which the water 

 has been wrung turn the western slopes almost to a desert. 



The Eastern Hemisphere has other codes of behavior for the earth, 

 the air, and the water. The results are the long slope toward the Arctic 

 and a series of rivers whose mouths are stopped with ice at the moment 

 when their higher channels are in the periods of inundation. The 

 Russian and Siberian wastes are the result, and the long north sloping 

 Piedmont from the North Sea to Lake Baikal. 



These coordinating activities result in the rich rivers of China, the 

 garden spot of Japan, the overwatered regions of southeastern Asia, 

 the great desert region of central Asia, the varied climate of India, the 

 excessively complex arrangement of elevation, heat, precipitation, and 

 water front about southern and western Europe. In Africa and the 

 Indo-Pacific Archipelagos the phenomena also form part of a single 

 scheme. 



To the arts of man all mountains, all rivers, forests, prairies, and 

 deserts are necessary, — the deep sea no less than those prolific feeding 

 grounds into which early men ventured and learned their first lesson in 

 self-confidence, the end of which would come to be familiarity with the 

 whole globe. 



In fact, the whole world is now, and always has been, a single envi- 

 ronment for man, fitted up with more or less spacious environments 

 in which the first human groups settled, and as they became richer and 

 stronger they took larger and larger apartments. Each one of these 

 environments had a character of its own and the only possibility for a 

 SM 95 41 



