37o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE ATLANTIC FOREST REGION OE NORTH AMERICA 



By SPENCER TROTTER 



SWAETHMOEI COLLEGE 



A Study of Influences 



RATZEL in his illuminating work on " The History of Mankind/' 

 remarking upon the influence of the ocean on the life of primi- 

 tive peoples, says: 



The wide gap which the Atlantic Ocean opens in the zone of habitation 

 has the effect of producing " fringe "-lands. Although a brisk intercourse 

 from north to south, together with thickly-peopled regions at the back, and more 

 favorable climates, have rendered these far less ethnographically destitute than 

 the regions towards the poles, we still find that in Africa the highest develop- 

 ment has been reached on the east coast, in America on the west, that is, on 

 the inner sides or those farthest from the Atlantic. 



In contrast with this "gap in the belt of human habitation" the 

 island-dotted Pacific, with its narrowing shore lines to the north, is a 

 habitable area. Its island clusters have ever been the homes of men, 

 and its watery waste the highway of primitive navigators. Dwellers on 

 the fringe-lands of the continents looked out upon the Atlantic as 

 upon a great void, and it was not until the first thousand years of the 

 present era had passed that Scandinavian peoples penetrated its 

 gloomy mists and founded colonies in Iceland and the Faroes. This 

 movement of the Northmen was an expression of that migratory im- 

 pulse that earlier had brought the rude peoples of Europe to the con- 

 fines of the land. Five hundred years passed before the " wide gap " 

 was again crossed. 



Such a forbidding "fringe," on the farther verge of the known 

 world, was the landfall of the first voyagers, who, steering westward, 

 solved the mystery of the western ocean. In their wake followed suc- 

 cessive waves of migrating peoples from the shores of Europe, who 

 sought to found colonies on these strange coasts. Whatever fanciful 

 Eldorados they may have pictured were rudely dispelled by the wild 

 solitudes of an unknown forest that, sphinx-like, stretched its front 

 along the indented coast from the St. Lawrence to Florida. Between 

 Aese peoples and the world of civilization lay the dissociating Atlantic. 

 Om°,e landed, they had set foot on the threshold of a new home. To the 

 natural features of this threshold — forest, mountain, river, shore-line 

 and climate — and its aboriginal life, we must look for those influences 

 that went so largely to the making of a new type of civilized men. 



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