And now for the merest sketch of its distribution, the details of which are to be learnt from Dr. Haddon’s valuable paper in The Study of Man.  England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales have it.  It can be tracked along central Europe through Switzerland, Germany, and Poland beyond the Carpathians, whereupon ancient Greece with its Dionysiac mysteries takes up the tale.  In America it is found amongst the Eskimo, is scattered over the northern part of the continent down to the Mexican frontier, and then turns up afresh in central Brazil.  Again, from the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra it extends over the great fan of darker peoples, from Africa, west and south, to New Guinea, Melanesia, and Australia, together with New Zealand alone of Polynesian islands—­a fact possibly showing it to have belonged to some earlier race of colonists.  Thus in all of the great geographical areas the bull-roarer is found, and that without reckoning in analogous implements like the so-called “buzz,” which cover further ground, for instance, the eastern coastlands of Asia.  Are we to postulate many independent origins, or else far-reaching transportations by migratory peoples, by the American Indians and the negroes, for example?  No attempt can be made here to answer these questions.  It is enough to have shown by the use of a single illustration how the study of the geographical distribution of inventions raises as many difficulties as it solves.

Our conclusion, then, must be that the anthropologist, whilst constantly consulting his physical map of the world, must not suppose that by so doing he will be saved all further trouble.  Geographical facts represent a passive condition, which life, something by its very nature active, obeys, yet in obeying conquers.  We cannot get away from the fact that we are physically determined.  Yet, physical determinations have been surmounted by human nature in a way to which the rest of the animal world affords no parallel.  Thus man, as the old saying has it, makes love all the year round.  Seasonal changes of course affect him, yet he is no slave of the seasons.  And so it is with the many other elements involved in the “geographic control.”  The “road,” for instance—­that is to say, any natural avenue of migration or communication, whether by land over bridges and through passes, or by sea between harbours and with trade-winds to swell the sails—­takes a hand in the game of life, and one that holds many trumps; but so again does the non-geographical fact that your travelling-machine may be your pair of legs, or a horse, or a boat, or a railway, or an airship.  Let us be moderate in all things, then, even in our references to the force of circumstances.  Circumstances can unmake; but of themselves they never yet made man, nor any other form of life.

CHAPTER V LANGUAGE