Latitudinarianism

“ One might naturally wish to see the region of such an aggregation of frontiers, where boundaries run like contour-lines on a topographic map—the wavering, imaginary lines upon the earth's Asiatic surface, for which, and to which, literally, millions of lives have been sacrificed—expressions of an "idea" for which many more lives must be given. ”

“ The conventionalities of civilization do not apply; latitude and longitude make broad differences as to what constitutes vice and virtue, reason or unreason. Modern instances are inadequate as a criterion of comparison. One who has traveled in many lands has learned to expand his horizon of judgment to accord with his geographical experience. ”

“ Can the actual state of the earth be considered as definitive? The revolutions which have fashioned its surface, and produced the Alps in Europe, Mount Ararat in Asia, the Cordilleras in the New World—are they to be the last? In a word, will the terrestrial sphere for ever preserve the form under which we know it—as it has been, so to speak, impressed on our memories by the maps of the geographers? ”

“ True, geography has now mapped out into mere earth and water the space that lay beyond the narrower sea and land known to the older nations, and astronomy no longer recognizes the flat earth trodden by men as being the roof of subterranean halls, nor the sky as being a solid firmament, shutting out men’s gaze from strata or spheres of empyræan regions beyond. ”

“ This depends primarily upon the articulation of a land-mass, whether it presents an unbroken contour like Africa and India, or whether, like Europe and Norway, it drops a fringe of peninsulas and a shower of islands into the bordering ocean. Mere distance from the sea bars a country from its vivifying contact; every protrusion of an ocean artery into the heart of a continent makes that heart feel the pulse of life on far-off, unseen shores. ”

“ Two thousand miles of ceaseless rush and rattle and clatter, by night and by day, and never a weary moment, never a lapse of interest! The first seven hundred miles a level continent, its grassy carpet greener and softer and smoother than any sea, and figured with designs fitted to its magnitude—the shadows of the clouds. ”

“ If he is to render an impression of space that widens and widens, a hint is enough; the mere association of his picture with the thought of those illimitable plains might alone enlarge it to the utmost of his need. The imagination of distance is everywhere, not only in a free prospect, where sight is lost, but on any river-bank, where the course of the stream lies across a continent, or on the edge of a wood, whence the forest stretches round the curve of the globe. ”

“ Since the Elysian Fields and the Coast of Bohemia have no assignable latitude and longitude, we call these places imaginary, even if in some dream we remember to have visited them and dwelt there with no less sense of reality than in this single and geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to sanity and common-sense, as men now possess them, to admit no countries unknown to geography and filling no part of the conventional space in three dimensions. ”

“ Geography sees various forms of the historical movement as the struggle for space in which humanity has forever been engaged. In this struggle the stronger peoples have absorbed ever larger portions of the earth's surface. Hence, through continual subjection to new conditions here or there and to a greater sum total of various conditions, they gain in power by improved variation, as well as numerically by the enlargement of their geographic base. ”

“ Such inequality in the rate of rising or sinking, when we contemplate large continental spaces, is quite consistent with what we know of the course of nature in our own times as well as at remote geological epochs. ”

“ In short, from what we do know of the geological structure — 363 — of the continents in question, we can hardly doubt that they have passed through geographical revolutions of a like kind with those of Europe and North America. Everywhere over the great continental plateau elevation appears, in the long-run, to have been in excess of depression, so that, in spite of many subsidences, the tendency of the land throughout the world has been to extend its margins, and to become more and more consolidated. ”

“ In contradistinction to continental and intercontinental location, anthropo-geography recognizes two other narrower meanings of the term. The innate mobility of the human race, due primarily to the eternal food-quest and increase of numbers, leads a people to spread out over a territory till they reach the barriers which nature has set up, or meet the frontiers of other tribes and nations. Their habitat or their specific geographic location is thus defined by natural features of mountain, desert and sea, or by the neighbors whom they are unable to displace, or more often by both. ”

“ A space of nearly forty degrees of latitude remains as little known to us, as if it were a part of the surface of Saturn, or an orb revolving round a star of the eighth magnitude. We know nothing of the inhabitants of those regions, or what kind of animate beings exist in them.
It was a prevailing opinion among the ancients, the correctness of which they for ages never called in question, that the temperate zones of our globe were alone habitable.—The torrid zone they imagined was composed of nothing but sandy deserts, scorched up by the vertical and insupportable beams of a burning sun. ”

“ In physical geography, there are two extremes equally unfavourable for the higher development of man; namely, the equatorial region, where Nature does too much; and the polar region, where she does too little. No high civilization adorns the equatorial day; none such blooms in the polar night. And so there are two analogous extremes in the geography of human condition;—polar misfortune, equatorial prosperity. ”

“ Upon this summit theories grow lively; the arguments of the books breathe new life into the story of the mountains, and the past appears grander than the present. This country was in the beginning a solitary and boiling sea, then slowly cooled, finally peopled by living creatures and built up by their debris. Thus were formed the ancient limestones, the slates of transition and several of the secondary rocks. What myriads of ages are accumulated in a single phrase! Time is a solitude in which we set up here and there our boundaries; they reveal its immensity, but do not measure it. ”

“ It cannot be doubted that the change of situation with respect to longitude has a much greater influence upon the variation of the needle, than change of latitude. The variation increased sensibly in proportion as we advanced farther eastward. ”

“ In every problem of history there are two main factors, variously stated as heredity and environment, man and his geographic conditions, the internal forces of race and the external forces of habitat. Now the geographic element in the long history of human development has been operating strongly and operating persistently. Herein lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man. ”

“ The present and the past are thus linked together not merely by dead matter, but by the world of living things, into one vast system of continuous progression.
In this marvellous increase of knowledge regarding the transformations of the earth's surface, one of the most impressive features, to my mind, is the power now given to us of perceiving the many striking contrasts between the present and former aspects of topography and scenery. We seem to be endowed with a new sense. ”

“ Why, the temperate zones, at a time more or less distant, will be no more habitable than are the Polar regions now. Then human, as well as animal life, will be driven to latitudes more directly under the influence of the solar rays. ”

“ Thus it is, that throughout the table lands, the geographical position, as far as latitude is concerned, is entirely neutralized by the extreme rarefaction of the atmosphere obtained by ascending through loftier regions. ”

“ Europe and England are at the ends of the earth; the tropics are biological head-quarters. The equatorial zone is therefore the true school for the historian of life in its more universal and lasting aspects. ”

“ As we advance into more southern latitudes approaching the 50th parallel of latitude in Europe, and the 40th in North America, this disturbing cause ceases to oppose a bar to our inquiries; but even then, in consequence of the fragmentary nature of all geological annals, our progress is inevitably slow in constructing anything like a connected chain of history, which can only be effected by bringing the links of the chain found in one area to supply the information which is wanting in another. ”

“ We may thus speak of the great world-ridges as regions of dominant elevation, and of the profound oceanic troughs as areas of more or less persistent depression. From one point of view, it is true, no part of the earth’s surface can be looked upon as a region of dominant elevation. Our globe is a cooling and contracting body, and depression must always be the prevailing movement of the lithosphere. The elevation of the continental plateau is thus only relative. ”

“ Looking back through the long vista of the past, we see each continental area in a state of flux—land alternating with sea, and sea with land—mountains and plateaux appearing and disappearing—a constant succession of modifications, brought about by the antagonistic subterranean and sub-aërial agents. ”

“ Man has been so noisy about the way he has "conquered Nature," and Nature has been so silent in her persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the equation of human development has been overlooked. ”

“ Thus, as we see the popular survey of regions, geography in its literal and initial sense, deepening into the various analyses of this and that aspect or element of the environment which we call the natural sciences—but which we might with advantage also recognise as what they really are, each a geolysis—so these sciences or geolyses, again, are tending to reunite into a higher geography considered as an account of the evolution of the cosmos. ”

“ But the whole space to the west, between the 98th meridian and the Rocky Mountains, is a barren waste, over which the eye may roam to the extent of the visible horizon with scarcely an object to break the monotony. ”

“ To find the latitude of a place is not so difficult—the length of the day at different times of the year will by itself be almost enough to determine this, as we have seen in the very earliest history of Greek Page 163 geography—but to determine the longitude was a much more difficult task, which in the earlier stages could only be formed by guesswork and dead reckonings. ”

“ In fine, we cannot quit the subject without being convinced that these ceaseless changes afford one of the grandest examples of that continuous series of mutations—cycle and epicycle—which has been already alluded to as a distinguishing feature in all the operations of Nature. We are accustomed to think and speak of "the everlasting hills." We look on the solid lands whereon we dwell as the emblem of all that is stable and steadfast, and on the boundless ocean as the type of all that is unsteady and changeful. ”

“ Here is a vast extent of territory, comprising about one hundred and sixty-five degrees of longitude and thirty-five of latitude, which contains within its limits a greater variety of bad climates, and a greater amount of land unavailable for any purposes of human life, than any equal compass of territory upon the globe, if we except Africa, which is at least doubtful. ”

“ Plateaus and mountains, different as they are in appearance and characteristics, yet constitute, in their mutual action and reaction, and in their forms of transition from the one to the other, the highland system of the globe. Their relations are inexhaustible as Nature herself. We cannot study them without profit ”

“ But modern observations have tended continually to dispel this delusion, and the geologist is now convinced that at no given era of the past have the boundaries of land and sea, or the height of the one and depth of the other, or the geographical range of the species inhabiting them, whether of animals or plants, become fixed and unchangeable. Of the extent to which fluctuations have been going on since the globe had already become the dwelling-place of Man, some idea may be formed from the examples which I shall give in this and the next nine chapters. ”

“ As is only natural with a developing subject, much discussion has taken place as to the exact limits of its field of action, and many definitions have been proposed with the object of setting forth these limits as clearly as possible. But it is sufficient for our purpose to note that geography deals with the surface-relief of the earth, and with the influence which that relief exercises upon the distribution of other phenomena, and especially upon the life of man. ”

“ These popular efforts to explain physical phenomena [Pg 52] which, from the earliest days of human experience, have appealed most forcibly to the imagination, have survived longest in the more rugged and remote regions, partly, no doubt, because these regions have lain furthest away from the main onward stream of human progress, but partly also because it is there that the most impressive topographical features exist. The natural influence of mountain-scenery upon the mind is probably of an awe-inspiring, depressing kind. ”