Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/327

 STUDIES IN POLITICAL AREAS 313

tic animals, give rise in all parts of the world, but especially in Asia and Africa, to a nomadic life. This, in accordance with its nature, needs and controls broad stretches of country, and hence offers a lively contrast to the contracted life of a sedentary agri- cultural population and the necessarily scattered hunting folk of the forests. The result is an internal division of the continent into the nomadic region and the region of permanent settlement, in part coinciding with that of the continental body and the con- tinental limbs. Therefore, in the Old World, the regions of active historic movement lay in the great zone of steppes and in the neighboring lands ; while on the contrary, in the America and Australia of pre-European times, we find only a tardy prog- ress and a lack of every higher development of governmental organization such as is produced in the Old World by the politi- cal stratification of imperious nomads over the masses of indus- trious agricultural peoples. Therefore, too, great states appear in the steppe and subpolar regions, where a thin population offers no appreciable resistance to subjugation ; on the border lands, over into which the movements from the steppes extend, we find medium states, as in Iran, Mesopotamia and in the whole breadth of the Soudan from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean. Forest regions develop a type such as prevailed in the Negro countries of Africa up to the first invasion of the Europeans and Arabians. There the village states of from four to forty square miles lay like cells in a great magma, within their impene- trable bordtr forests or border prairies, the area of which would equal or even exceed that of the community itself. This condi- tion of things was the rule in all the forest lands of the New World and Oceanica, of ancient Europe and northern Asia, as also of Australia, and it even survived in Farther India nearly up to our time between the greater states which from the coasts and rivers had sent their roots farther back into the land.

FRIEDRICH RATZEL.

UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG.