In a similar way, the Arab of the desert became transformed into the sedentary lord of Spain.  In the luxuriance of field and orchard which his skilful methods of irrigation and tillage produced, in the growing predominance of the intellectual over the nomadic military life, of the complex affairs of city and mart over the simple tasks of herdsman or cultivator, he lost the benefit of the early harsh training and therewith his hold upon his Iberian empire.  Biblical history gives us the picture of the Sheik Abraham, accompanied by his nephew Lot, moving up from the rainless plains of Mesopotamia with his flocks and herds into the better watered Palestine.  There his descendants in the garden land of Canaan became an agricultural people; and the problem of Moses and the Judges was to prevent their assimilation in religion and custom to the settled Semitic tribes about them, and to make them preserve the ideals born in the starry solitudes of the desert.

[Sidenote:  Retrogression in new habitat.]

The change from the nomadic to the sedentary life represents an economic advance.  Sometimes removal to strongly contrasted geographic conditions necessitates a reversion to a lower economic type of existence.  The French colonists who came to Lower Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found themselves located in a region of intense cold, where arable soil was inferior in quality and limited in amount, producing no staple like the tobacco of Virginia or the wheat of Maryland or the cotton of South Carolina or the sugar of the West Indies, by which a young colony might secure a place in European trade.  But the snow-wrapped forests of Canada yielded an abundance of fur-bearing animals, the fineness and thickness of whose pelts were born of this frozen north.  Into their remotest haunts at the head of Lake Superior or of Hudson Bay, long lines of rivers and lakes opened level water roads a thousand miles or more from the crude little colonial capital at Quebec.  And over in Europe beaver hats and fur-trimmed garments were all the style!  So the plodding farmer from Normandy and the fisherman from Poitou, transferred to Canadian soil, were irresistibly drawn into the adventurous life of the trapper and fur-trader.  The fur trade became the accepted basis of colonial life; the voyageur and courier de bois, clad in skins, paddling up ice-rimmed streams in their birch-bark canoes, fraternizing with Indians who were their only companions in that bleak interior, and married often to dusky squaws, became assimilated to the savage life about them and reverted to the lower hunter stage of civilization.[76]

[Sidenote:  The Boers of South Africa]