of paper in its mouth representing one share in the British Empire.  Secondly, there is its race, involving, let us say, blue eyes and light hair, and a corresponding constitution.  Thirdly, there is the climate and all that goes with it.  Though in the first of these respects the white child is likely to be superior to the native, inasmuch as it will be tended with more careful regard to the laws of health; yet such disharmony prevails between the other two factors of race and climate, that it will almost certainly die, if it is not removed at a certain age from the country.  Possibly the English could acclimatize themselves in India at the price of an immense toll of infant lives; but it is a price which they show no signs of being willing to pay.

What, then, are the limits of the geographical control?  Where does its influence begin and end?  Situation, race and culture—­to reduce it to a problem of three terms only—­which of the three, if any, in the long run controls the rest?  Remember that the anthropologist is trying to be the historian of long perspective.  History which counts by years, proto-history which counts by centuries, pre-history which counts by millenniums—­he seeks to embrace them all.  He sees the English in India, on the one hand, and in Australia on the other.  Will the one invasion prove an incident, he asks, and the other an event, as judged by a history of long perspective?  Or, again, there are whites and blacks and redskins in the southern portion of the United States of America, having at present little in common save a common climate.  Different races, different cultures, a common geographical situation—­what net result will these yield for the historian of patient, far-seeing anthropological outlook?  Clearly there is here something worth the puzzling out.  But we cannot expect to puzzle it out all at once.

In these days geography, in the form known as anthropo-geography, is putting forth claims to be the leading branch of anthropology.  And, doubtless, a thorough grounding in geography must henceforth be part of the anthropologist’s equipment.[3] The schools of Ratzel in Germany and Le Play in France are, however, fertile in generalizations that are far too pretty to be true.  Like other specialists, they exaggerate the importance of their particular brand of work.  The full meaning of life can never be expressed in terms of its material conditions.  I confess that I am not deeply moved when Ratzel announces that man is a piece of the earth.  Or when his admirers, anxious to improve on this, after distinguishing the atmosphere or air, the hydrosphere or water, the lithosphere or crust, and the centrosphere or interior mass, proceed to add that man is the most active portion of an intermittent biosphere, or living envelope of our planet, I cannot feel that the last word has been said about him.

[Footnote 3:  Thus the reader of the present work should not fail to study also Dr. Marion Newbigin’s Geography in this series.]