Or, again, listen for a moment to M. Demolins, author of a very suggestive book, Comment la route cree le type social ("How the road creates the social type").  “There exists,” he says in his preface, “on the surface of the terrestrial globe an infinite variety of peoples.  What is the cause that has created this variety?  In general the reply is, Race.  But race explains nothing; for it remains to discover what has produced the diversity of races.  Race is not a cause; it is a consequence.  The first and decisive cause of the diversity of peoples and of the diversity of races is the road that the peoples have followed.  It is the road that creates the race, and that creates the social type.”  And he goes further:  “If the history of humanity were to recommence, and the surface of the globe had not been transformed, this history would repeat itself in its main lines.  There might well be secondary differences, for example, in certain manifestations of public life, in political revolutions, to which we assign far too great an importance; but the same roads would reproduce the same social types, and would impose on them the same essential characters.”

There is no contending with a pious opinion, especially when it takes the form of an unverifiable prophecy.  Let the level-headed anthropologist beware, however, lest he put all his eggs into one basket.  Let him seek to give each factor in the problem its due.  Race must count for something, or why do not the other animals take a leaf out of our book and build up rival civilizations on suitable sites?  Why do men herd cattle, instead of the cattle herding the men?  We are rational beings, in other words, because we have it in us to be rational beings.  Again, culture, with the intelligence and choice it involves, counts for something too.  It is easy to argue that, since there were the Asiatic steppes with the wild horses ready to hand in them, man was bound sooner or later to tame the horse and develop the characteristic culture of the nomad type.  Yes, but why did man tame the horse later rather than sooner?  And why did the American redskins never tame the bison, and adopt a pastoral life in their vast prairies?  Or why do modern black folk and white folk alike in Africa fail to utilize the elephant?  Is it because these things cannot be done, or because man has not found out how to do them?

When all allowances, however, are made for the exaggerations almost pardonable in a branch of science still engaged in pushing its way to the front, anthropo-geography remains a far-reaching method of historical study which the anthropologist has to learn how to use.  To put it crudely, he must learn how to work all the time with a map of the earth at his elbow.