[1404] E.C.  Semple, The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains, Geographical Journal, Vol.  XVII, pp. 588-623.  London, 1901.

[1405] Sir Thomas Holdich, The Origin of the Kafir of the Hindu Kush, Geographical Journal, Vol.  VII, p. 42.  London, 1896.

[1406] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 259-261.  New York, 1897.

[1407] Isabella Bird Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbors, pp. 21, 134-135, 140, 142.  New York, 1897.

[1408] Article Waldenses, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

CHAPTER XVII

THE INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE

[Sidenote:  Importance of climatic influences.]

Climate enters fundamentally into all consideration of geographic influences, either by implication or explicitly.  It is a factor in most physiological and psychological effects of environment.  It underlies the whole significance of zonal location, continental and insular.  Large territorial areas are favorable to improved variation in men and animals partly because they comprise a diversity of natural conditions, of which a wide range of climates forms one.  This is also one advantage of a varied relief, especially in the Tropics, where all the zones may be compressed into a small area on the slopes of high mountains like the Andes and Kilimanjaro.  Climate fixes the boundaries of human habitation in Arctic latitudes and high altitudes by drawing the dead-line to all organic life.  It dominates life in steppes and torrid deserts as in sub-polar wastes.  It encourages intimacy with the sea in tropical Malays and Polynesians, and like a slave-driver, scourges on the fur-clad Eskimo to reap the harvest of the deep.  It is always present in that intricate balance of geographic factors which produces a given historical result, throwing its weight now into one side of the scales, now into the other.  It underlies the production, distribution and exchange of commodities derived from the vegetable and animal kingdoms, influences methods of agriculture, and the efficiency of human labor in various industries.[1409] Hence it is a potent factor in the beginning and in the evolution of civilization, so far as this goes hand in hand with economic development.

[Sidenote:  Climate in the interplay of geographic factors.]

The foregoing chapters have therefore been indirectly concerned with climate to no small degree, but they have endeavored to treat the subject analytically, showing climate as working with or against or in some combination with other geographic factors.  This course was necessary, because climatic influences are so conspicuous and so important that by the older geographers like Montesquieu[1410] and others, they have been erected into a blanket theory, and made to explain a wide range of social and historical phenomena which were properly the effect of other geographic factors.