THE STUDY OF ENVIRONMENT Environment may be regarded as on the whole the passive con dition, while race and culture are the active conditions, of sur vival through superior adjustment. Though the surroundings to which the human species must adapt itself include the rest of living nature, intelligence, which is the measure of genuine activity, is mostly on the side of man at present, though this was less markedly so in very early times. Forces such as climate and the formation of the earth's surface operate blindly, that is, in a purely physical way; whereas life in proportion as it is intelligent tempers necessity with a certain freedom of choice. A region, let us say, becomes colder or drier. The vegetation struggles in vain to resist the change, and shrinks. The animals hardly put up a better fight. Man, however, as he advances in civilization, can, within limits, make a successful stand by adopting fresh arts; or, if alternatively, he decides to remove to a more suitable place, he has the advantage over the plant or the beast in knowing where to go and how to get there.
The farther we delve into the past, however, the signs of human intelligence decrease ; so that it may be plausibly assumed that in the unknown foretime when the species was barely emergent—not less, say, than half a million years ago—the geographical control bore on man in much the same way as on the rest of the animal creation. If by this time he differed from the apes in having acquired a decided preference for a meat diet, his association with certain f ood-animals would be all the closer. When, therefore, the Pleistocene Ice Age began— the point of time from which it is fairly practicable to date man's story—great oscillations of climate set the biological world sway ing in such concert as it could manage ; and we must picture man pushed backwards and forwards, together with such other land animals as could last the pace, along whatever natural highways the geography of the moment could provide.
It is, indeed, essential to note that the distri bution of land and water was changing all the while, as well as the climate; so that some paths led as it were over draw-bridges that permitted no return. America, for instance, once had a land connexion with north-eastern Asia that was then interrupted so as to leave only a precarious passage by way of the sea-ice; and so again the bridge from Africa into Europe by way of Malta broke down completely. If we could place with any certainty the cradle-land of the species—always supposing that it is one species and not an amalgamation of several that originated in as many distinct regions—we might try to calculate in terms of cli matic pulsation the successive outward thrusts along the available avenues leading to more favoured spots. If, further, we could assume this cradle-land, whether because of its sheer position at the cross-roads, or because it periodically provided optimum con ditions to which the species must return in order to be rejuve nated, to keep on sending out fresh editions of man, we might expect the chances of survival for an earlier, and presumably inferior, edition, to improve in direct ratio with its distance from the focus of evolutionary activity. Wiped out or at least buried deep at the centre of the human world, the relics of bygone dis pensations would nevertheless occur on or near the surface any where round its circumference.
On such lines Griffith Taylor, following up the work of Ellsworth Huntington and others on the climatic factor, conceives the field of human distribution on a tri-peninsular basis, with its centre somewhere near Turkistan— in fact, not far north of the legendary situation of the Garden of Eden ; while Tasmania, Tierra del Fuego, and the Cape of Good Hope mark the dead ends in this three-cornered scheme. He goes on to postulate eight racial types succeeding one another— Neanderthal, Negrito, Australian, Negro, Iberian, Nordic, early Alpine, late Alpine; and tries to show that their present distribu tion falls into concentric zones, with the earliest races towards the fringe ; while conversely, if the archaeologist digs down for their remains, the earliest will furnish the lowest stratum. Put forward as it is without dogmatism, this scheme may be cited as an instructive attempt to view human history as a whole from the angle of the anthropo-geographer. After all, it applies to man a method of zoning which the biologist has applied to the distribu tion of all the other forms of life with considerable success.
The weak point in such a method as extended to man, however, is that man alone has culture; and when culture is sufficiently advanced, it becomes truer to say that man controls his environment than that his environment controls him. Race without culture must respond to a physical stimulus in a quasi-physical way; so that, for instance, so long as man was the land-animal which, so to speak, nature intended him to be, he must foot it together with the other land animals along the existing bridges and corridors, and had virtually no choice in the matter. Given a boat, however, he became am phibious; he could to that extent make free with geography, as for example, by crossing the "zoological divide" into Australia— an impracticable water-jump for the other developed mammals, but a mere ferry for man with his attendant dog. Or, again, let the art of navigation be elaborated, and the British Isles, hitherto a geographical fastness, become the gate of the Atlantic. Cultural anthropology, therefore, since it is especially concerned with the creative efforts of the human intelligence, must largely supply the key to the ethnology of the modern world.
On the other hand, much is to be learned from the study of environment in relation to every phase of history. Now, the ground-plan of the principal land-masses has probably—despite picturesque theories about lost continents—not greatly altered within human times ; some sagging at the south-eastern corner of Asia and to a larger extent at the north-western edge of Europe being responsible for the most noteworthy changes. Again, no striking upheavals in the way of mountain-building have occurred in the same period; though the violent disturbance of the Tertiary epoch may have done much to stimulate biological evolution and, in particular, to shape the career of our pre-human ancestor. Thus the an thropo-geographer can afford to concentrate on climate, treating flora and fauna, and even avenues of migration, as dependent subjects. Calculating temperatures, rainfall and so on for given regions as the climate varies, he can proceed to map out areas of relative habitability, suiting man more or less closely according to his degree of culture. Desert and dense forest are the extremes; between them—anywhere, in fact, between open steppe and parkland—lies the happy mean, not only for the hunters but likewise for the food-raising peoples. More especially inhos pitable is the arid type of desert, more so even than the frozen type or tundra; lack of rain being the physical scourge that man has to fear most. Nay, as a cause of migration on a grand scale desiccation is perhaps more effective than any cultural influence, such as commercial enterprise or colonial expansion. It is, on the other hand, precisely in the inhospitable parts of the earth— or else in out-of-the-way places, such as islands, mountain-valleys or swamps, which may be inhospitable as well as isolated—that the broken peoples are likely to be met with, battered vessels seeking harbour where they can. Thus the study of environment teaches the anthropologist where to look alike for the strong and for the weak among the human candidates for survival. Geographical considerations will not suffice to explain the full conditions of the struggle between ethnic types; but whoever aspires to understand human history as a whole must at least acquire the map-making, map-reading faculty at the start.
