Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/115

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY IOI

by all the proprietors of the polder; this is the executive council of the little agricultural republics, which orders and directs the necessary work ; the cost of the latter is defrayed by a contribu- tion proportionate to the extent of each individual's property. 1

However, besides these variable methods represented by Egypt on the one side and Holland on the other, we recognize here again a constant statical law of the relation of work to the environment; in the species it is the necessity of collective work imposed by the conditions of the natural environment. This large co-operation, servile or voluntary, which requires the placing of deltas in civilization, is recompensed by their superior fertility ; it contradicts the too absolute law of Ricardo in show- ing that if the most fertile lands are first placed under cultiva- tion, it is only these which present this character relatively to each state of civilization and the means of which it makes use. The most fertile lands have been for a long time the least accessible to cultivation ; placing them in cultivation produced subsequent progress. Thus the deltaic civilizations, despite the great antiquity of some of them, belong to a relatively modern period. This was the case for the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Po, Rhone; and, in later times, for the vast and unique delta formed by the Rhine, the Meuse, and Escaut. These deltas, as well as many others, have been, still are, and will be more and more, as in India, China, and the two Americas, the seat of large societies ; they will facilitate communication between the different civiliza- tions and the different varieties of the human species.

Thus, social statics, with its particularities always present, although often attenuated and transformed, is resolved finally into universal statics, of which the geographical, orographical, and hydrographical structure appears like tissue, at the same time bony and fluid, not external and distinct, but internal to the larger human society and the innumerable societies, of varying degrees of complexity of structure, which compose it. The seas and oceans, the valleys and mountains, etc., form an integral part of human civilization in the same way that the shell forms a part of the tortoise, the skeleton of man, and the

T E. DE LAVELEYE, Rapport au congrls agricole de Paris, 1878.