Shall we then cavalierly banish geography from cultural considerations? This would be manifestly going beyond the mark. Geographical phenomena can no more be discarded than can psychological phenomena. They represent in the first place a limiting condition. As cultures cannot contravene psychological principles so they cannot, except in a limited measure, override geographical factors. To use some drastically clear if somewhat hackneyed examples, the Eskimo do not eat coconuts nor do the Oceanians build snow-houses; where the horse does not occur it cannot be domesticated; in the Hopi country where watercourses are lacking navigation naturally did not develop. As Jochelson points out, the Koryak of northeastern Siberia cannot cultivate cereals because of the low temperature and they cannot succeed as cattle-breeders because of the poor quality of the grasses.[12] This minimum recognition of environment as a purely negative factor, however, does not do full justice to it. Take the bison out of the Plains Indian’s life and his cultural atmosphere certainly changes. Nevertheless, we have seen that the presence of the bison by no means fully determined the cultural employment possible. Instead of hunting it as the Solutrean Europeans did the wild horse, the Indian might have domesticated it as his namesake by misnomer in Asia domesticated the buffalo. The environment, then, enters into culture, not as a formative but rather as an inert element ready to be selected from and molded. It is, of course, a matter of biological necessity for a people to establish some sort of adaptation to surrounding conditions, but such adaptation is no more spontaneously generated by the environment than are strictly biological adaptations. There are alternatives to adaptation--migration and destruction. It is true, as Dr. Wissler has forcibly pointed out, that when some kind of adjustment has once been established it will tend to persist in the region of its origin.[13] This, however, illustrates not so much the active influence of environment as rather the tremendous force of cultural inertia which tends to perpetuate an old muddling-along adjustment, however imperfect, provided only it has bare survival value.