see how tool-using man, who is generally supposed to have originated somewhere in the warm belts, came to take the first and the most difficult steps in the upward progress where there was so little, if any, incentive to that sustained effort and concentration of the mind which is required for the thinking out of the most difficult of all thoughts, the first principles of any art or craft.  Why, we may well ask, should the primitive African have worried about cultivating the soil where edible roots and berries abounded?  Why should he have bothered about making fire where there was no need of artificial warmth or for the cooking of food?  Why should he have cudgeled his brains to fashion weapons and to contrive snares for the killing of game of which he was in no more need than his vegetarian cousins, the anthropoid apes?  Why should there have been progress where the environment provided no stimuli therefore, in other words, why should primitive man have moved forward where indulgent nature allowed him to stand still?

If we believe, with Darwin and other students, that our primitive ancestors emerged from somewhere within the warm zones, we cannot avoid the difficulty of reconciling that supposition with the theory that civilisation is in the first instance the result of a stimulating environment.  If on the other hand, we surmise that homo sapiens originated in the colder parts of the world we still have to account for the fact that his further progress was made not in those parts but in warmer latitudes where a genial climate afforded no apparent provocation for continued effort in the way of invention and general development.

It would seem that the innate tendency to conservatism latent in man, the disposition to leave things as they are and to stick to the familiar devil rather than fly to unknown gods, is in itself sufficient to account for those lapses in mass-achievement and those long periods of stagnation which mark the course of mankind everywhere.  We see how Egypt hovered for centuries on the brink of the discovery of the alphabet but never attained thereto.  The exponents of the so-called “pulsatory hypothesis” can hardly claim that a change in the climate will explain the fact seeing that the neighbouring people were able to accomplish this great feat under very similar climatic conditions.  We see how China developed a wonderful civilisation while the Western world lay steeped in barbarism, and then went to sleep till now.  The size of that great country made possible always the friction between people coming from widely separated localities, which we believe to be conducive to progress, and the climate and general environment seems to have been no less favourable than in Europe and America.  We see how the Arabs made great conquests and enriched the world with many patient and accurate observations and then came to a standstill and remained as they are to-day in serene contentment, strangers to the very idea of progress.