Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/114

102 are found, in desert countries: mountain and plateau by the side of the plain; regions of primary rocks by the side of limestone formations, clays, sands, and lands of wholly different composition and age; hot and dry climates, and moist and cool; the sharp promontory looking out upon the open, and the gulf with low and swampy coast; and yet, also, among the countries that attract man, we can cite side by side the plain fruitful in harvest and the mountain rich in minerals; the temperate climates of the European seacoast and the hot and moist climate of the Soudan. The value of a country, therefore, does not depend upon any form of relief or any special situation or particular nature of the ground, or special climate, but upon all these things together and the way they are combined. Soil and climate affect fitness for agriculture; the geological formation bears on mining industry; relief, climate, and geological structure regulate the natural motor powers; and all these together, with situation, determine fitness for commercial enterprises. We may, therefore, define a country as the product of these four factors, either of which may, now here, now there, have the greater part in determining its production. If three of the factors are common to two countries, it only needs for the fourth to be different to determine a variance. Let one of these factors be eliminated, and the product becomes nothing. Such is the case in Greenland and desert countries generally, where the climate, a relativlyrelatively [sic] minor factor as to human existence in itself, produces a condition, however favorable the other factors may be, that makes human life almost impossible.

Thus in these four initial factors and their infinite combinations, under which the most numerous aspects and various conditions are engendered, are to be sought the reasons for the contrasts which are presented in the various regions of the earth and the human communities that are developed in them.

Both the earth and man are changing all the time, but there is no correspondence in the rate or the nature of the changes they undergo. The earth changes very slowly—so slowly that the progress is hardly appreciable in the lifetime of a single man, or so far, almost, of the human race; yet the continuance of its changes through a time of incalculable duration has made them very important, and has exposed it to many great revolutions.

Man undergoes vastly more rapid transformations. He is one of the latest comers on the earth, and has had an existence relatively as of only a moment. Yet he has undergone most wonderful transformations in his development from the cave dwellers of the stone age to the highly civilized man of the present, with his extensive knowledge and complicated relations. It is no exaggeration to say that the distance from the primitive man to the contemporary Englishman or