Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/513

Rh case, and a thicker population in the second. Our comparatively insignificant numbers would reduce us from the rank of a first-class European power to that of a nation existing on sufferance. Our army and navy would be smaller; our Parliament less important and less stimulating to high ambitions; our churches, our bar, our medical faculty less advanced in the fore-front of thought. Thus we should probably suffer in every respect, producing both absolutely and relatively fewer great men, either as thinkers, administrators, discoverers, inventors, or artists. For, when once a nation has fallen behind in the race, the audience addressed becomes smaller, the competition less keen as an incentive to effort, the rewards of success decrease in value, and the general atmosphere of example and rivalry deteriorates in power. Where few books are written, few investigations undertaken, few works of art produced, few and still fewer care to aspire toward a forgotten ideal. Thus, without coal, Britain might have declined from the England of Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton, just as other countries have declined from the Hellas of Pericles and Plato, and the Spain of Cervantes and Velasquez.

The relation between physical conditions and history in its wider acceptation being thus fundamental, it may be well to consider in somewhat greater detail the special reactions of a single tolerably definite portion of the natural environment upon human development. For this purpose we may choose the science of geology. It might seem at first sight that geological facts had very little to do with the course of history. Rocks and clays, lying often far beneath the surface, and comparatively disregarded till a late stage of civilization, would appear far less important in the evolution of mankind than plants and animals, geographical situation and meteorological conditions. But, though doubtless of inferior practical interest to these superficial phenomena, the geological constitution of the soil is yet pregnant with innumerable reactions upon the life of human beings who dwell upon its surface. I hope to show in the sequel that the rocks or minerals which lie beneath the thin coating of earth and vegetation have always exerted an immense though often unsuspected influence upon the history of man. And I shall choose most of my examples from well-known facts of the British Isles, only diverging elsewhere very occasionally for the sake of more striking or more conclusive instances.

To begin with, it must be premised that geological conditions were of comparatively less importance in very primitive times, and have increased in their practical relation to humanity with every additional step in general culture. This is only what we must expect from the nature of the case. Man's connection with his environment has necessarily grown more and more complex as his evolution proceeded. Soil becomes a matter of interest sooner than building-stone; potter's clay precedes copper or iron ore as a valuable object; metals of every