[Sidenote:  The cradle of civilization.]

The North Temperate Zone is preeminently the culture zone of the earth.  It is the seat of the most important, most steadily progressive civilizations, and the source of all the cultural stimuli which have given an upward start to civilization in other zones during the past three centuries.  It contains the Mediterranean basin, which was the pulsing heart of ancient history, and all the modern historically important regions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.  The temperate belt of the southern hemisphere also is following its lead, since European civilization has been transplanted to other parts of the world.  This is the zone which least suffers from the drawbacks of climatic monotony or extremes, and best combines, especially in the northern hemisphere, the wide range of annual and seasonal variety so favorable to economic and cultural development, with the incalculable advantage of large land area.

Man grew in the temperate zone, was born in the Tropics.  There, in his primitive, pre-civilized state, he lived in a moist, warm, uniform climate which supplied abundantly his simple wants, put no strain upon his feeble intellect and will.  That first crude human product of Nature’s Pliocene workshop turned out in the steaming lowland of Java, and now known to us as the Pithecanthropus erectus, found about him the climatic conditions generally conceded to have been necessary for man in his helpless, futile infancy.  Where man has remained in the Tropics, with few exceptions he has suffered arrested development.  His nursery has kept him a child.  Though his initial progress depended upon the gifts which Nature put into his hands, his later evolution depended far more upon the powers which she developed within him.  These have no limit, so far as our experience shows; but their growth is painful, reluctant.  Therefore they develop only where Nature subjects man to compulsion, forces him to earn his daily bread, and thereby something more than bread.  This compulsion is found in less luxurious but more salutary geographic conditions than the Tropics afford, in an environment that exacts a tribute of labor and invention in return for the boon of life, but offers a reward certain and generous enough to insure the accumulation of wealth which marks the beginning of civilization.[1451]

Most of the ancient civilizations originated just within the mild but drier margin of the Temperate Zone, where the cooler air of a short winter acted like a tonic upon the energies relaxed by the lethargic atmosphere of the hot and humid Tropics; where congenial warmth encouraged vegetation, but where the irrigation necessary to secure abundant and regular crops called forth inventiveness, cooeperation, and social organization, and gave to the people their first baptism of redemption from savagery to barbarism.  Native civilizations of limited development have arisen in the Tropics, but only where, as in Yemen, Mexico and Peru, a high, cool, semi-arid plateau, a restricted area of fertile soil, and a protected location alternately coddled and spurred the nascent people.