The soil on which a people dwell, the air they breathe, the mountains and seas by which they are surrounded, the skies that overshadow them,--all these exert a powerful influence on their pursuits, their habits, their institutions, their sentiments, and their ideas. So that could we clearly group, and fully grasp all the characteristics of a region--its position, configuration, climate, scenery, and natural products, we could, with tolerable accuracy, determine what are the characteristics of the people who inhabit it. A comprehensive knowledge of the physical geography of any country will therefore aid us materially in elucidating the natural history, and, to some extent, the moral history of its population. "History does not stand _outside_ of nature, but in her very heart, so that the historian only grasps a people's character with true precision when he keeps in full view its geographical position, and the influences which its surroundings have wrought upon it."[2] [Footnote 1: Niebuhr's "Lectures on Ethnography and Geography," p. 91.] [Footnote 2: Ritter's "Geographical Studies," p. 34.] It is, however, of the utmost consequence the reader should understand that there are two widely different methods of treating this deeply interesting subject--methods which proceed on fundamentally opposite views of man and of nature. One method is that pursued by Buckle in his "History of Civilization in England." The tendency of his work is the assertion of the supremacy of material conditions over the development of human history, and indeed of every individual mind. Here man is purely passive in the hands of nature. Exterior conditions are the chief, if not the _only_ causes of man's intellectual and social development. So that, such a climate and soil, such aspects of nature and local circumstances being given, such a nation necessarily follows.[3] The other method is that of Carl Ritter, Arnold Guyot, and Cousin.[4] These take account of the freedom of the human will, and the power of man to control and modify the forces of nature. They also take account of the original constitution of man, and the primitive type of nations; and they allow for results arising from the mutual conflict of geographical conditions. And they, especially, recognize the agency of a Divine Providence controlling those forces in nature by which the configuration of the earth's surface is determined, and the distribution of its oceans, continents, and islands is secured; and a providence, also, directing the dispersions and migrations of nations--determining the times of each nation's existence, and fixing the geographical bounds of their habitation, all in view of the _moral_ history and spiritual development of the race,--"that they may feel after, and find the living God." The relation of man and nature is not, in their estimation, a relation of cause and effect. It is a relation of adjustment, of harmony, and of reciprocal action and reaction. "Man is not"--says