Section XXXVII External Nature — The Geographical Character of a Country
The geographical character of a country is, as a rule,226 most intimately connected, not only with its flora and fauna, but also with the character of its people. One of the crowning glories of the progress of modern science is, that it has recognized anew the power of this wonderful organism, and that it has made geography an explanatory medium between nature and history. The conditions most favorable to the development of civilization are found in a well developed country which slopes gradually through a series of intermediate terraces from a mountain summit to a plain; especially when they are connected with one another by a good system of streams; since here the opposite peculiarities of the populations of the highlands and coast-lands227 tend to produce a nationality both one and varied. Where the transitions are too abrupt, as for instance, in New Holland, they easily impede inter-communication; and, still more, where the several parts of the country are of very great extent; as, for example, the desert of North Africa, the plateau of South Africa or that of Central Asia. Europe is favored above all other parts of the world by the happy combination of mountain and plain.228 We might pursue the parallel existing between the soil and the character of a people into the minutest details, and discover, even in the difference between Spanish, French, German and Hungarian wines, a reflection of the different characters of the people.229
But whence is this? Can it be that dead nature has thus irresistibly affected the living mind? We do not need to give a materialistic answer to the question.230 Almost every people has migrated at some period of its existence. Urged on by their peculiar tastes and tendencies, they settled in the places most in harmony with their character. A higher hand was over them; one which, we should unreservedly trust, placed them in such external circumstances as were most favorable to the development of all their faculties.
But the influences of man on nature are no less notable than those of nature upon man. The greater number of domestic animals and plants which Europe possesses to-day, it has been obliged to introduce from other parts of the globe.231 In the interior of Gaul, the vine rarely ripened, at the time of Christ.232 On the other hand, Mesopotamia, formerly one of the gardens of the world, is now covered with dried-up canals, filled a little below the surface with heaps of brick and broken vases, the remains and other vestiges of a once dense population. Its former rich alluvial soil, now almost calcined, produces at present scarcely anything except a few saline plants, mimosas etc.233 The higher the civilization of a people, the less does it depend on the nature of the country.