Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-GeographySemple, Ellen Churchill
History
Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography
Semple, Ellen Churchill
Human beings -- Effect of environment on; Human geography
An ethnographical map of Russia to-day shows a narrow but almost
continuous rim of Germans stretching from the River Niemen north through
the Baltic coast of Courland, Livland, and Esthland, as far as Revel;
and again, a similar band of Swedes along the seaboard of Finland, from
a point east of Helsingfors on the south around to Uleaborg on the
north,[483] dating from the time when Finland was a political dependency
of Sweden, and influenced by the fact that the frozen Gulf of Bothnia
every winter makes a bridge of ice between the two shores. [See map page
225.]
[Sidenote: Ethnic contrasts in the Pacific islands.]
Everywhere in the Melanesian archipelago, where Papuans and Malays dwell
side by side, the latter as the new-comers are always found in
possession of the coast, while the darker aborigines have withdrawn into
the interior. So in the Philippines, the aboriginal Negritos, pure or
more often mixed with Malayan blood, as in the Mangyan tribe of central
Mindoro, are found crowded back into the interior by the successive
invasions of Malays who have encircled the coasts. [See map page 147.]
The Zamboanga peninsula of Mindanao has an inland pagan population of
primitive Malayan race called Subanon, who have been displaced from the
littoral by the seafaring Samal Moros, Mohammedanized Malays from the
east shores of Sumatra and the adjacent islands, who spread northward
about 1300 under the energizing impulse of their new religion.[484] Even
at so late a date as the arrival of Magellan, the Subanon seem to have
still occupied some points of the coast,[485] just as the savage Ainos of
the Island of Yezo touched the sea about Sapporo only forty years ago,
though they are now surrounded by a seaboard rim of Japanese.[486]
[Sidenote: Ethnic contrasts in the Americas.]
If we turn to South America, we find that warlike Tupi, at the time of
the discovery, occupied the whole Brazilian coast from the southern
tropic north to eastern Guiana, while the highlands of eastern Brazil
immediately in their rear were populated by tribes of Ges, who had been
displaced by the coastwise expansion of the Tupi canoemen.[487] [See map
page 101.] And to-day this same belt of coastland has been appropriated
by a foreign population of Europeans and Negroes, while the vast
interior of Brazil shows a predominance of native Indian stocks, only
broken here and there by a lonely _enclave_ of Portuguese settlement.
The early English and French territories in America presented this same
contrast of coast and inland people--the colonists planting themselves
on the hem of the continent to preserve maritime connection with the
home countries, the aborigines forced back beyond reach of the tide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account