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
Wherever an energetic seafaring people with marked commercial or
colonizing bent make a highway of the deep, they give rise to this
distinction of coast and inland people on whatever shores they touch.
The expanding Angles and Saxons did it in the North Sea and the Channel,
where they stretched their _litus Saxonicum_ faintly along the coast of
the continent to the apex of Brittany, and firmly along the hem of
England from Southampton Water to the Firth of Forth;[488] the sea-bred
Scandinavians did it farther north in the Teutonic fringe of settlements
which they placed on the shores of Celtic Scotland and Ireland.[489]
[Sidenote: Older ethnic stock in coastlands.]
As a rule it is the new-comers who hold the coast, but occasionally the
coast-dwellers represent the older ethnic stock. In the Balkan Peninsula
to-day the descendants of the ancient Hellenes are, with few exceptions,
confined to the coast. The reason is to be found in the fact that the
Slavs and other northern races who have intruded by successive invasions
from the plains of southern Russia are primarily inland peoples, and
therefore have occupied the core of the peninsula, forcing the original
Greek population before them to the edge of the sea.[490] This is the
same anthropo-geographical process which makes so many peninsulas the
last halting-place of a dislodged earlier race. But the Greeks who line
the northern and western shores of Asiatic Turkey are such only in
language and religion, because their prevailing broad head-form shows
them to be Turks and Armenians in race stock.[491]
Sometimes the distinction of race between coast and interior is
obliterated so far as language and civilization are concerned, but
survives less conspicuously in head-form and pigmentation. The outermost
fringe of the Norwegian coast, from the extreme south to the latitude of
Trondhjem in the north, is occupied by a broad-headed, round-faced,
rather dark people of only medium height, who show decided affinities
with the Alpine race of Central Europe, and who present a marked
contrast to the tall narrow-headed blondes of pure Teutonic type,
constituting the prevailing population from the inner edge of the coast
eastward into Sweden. This brachycephalic, un-Germanic stock of the
Norwegian seaboard seems to represent the last stand made by that once
wide-spread Alpine race, which here has been shoved along to the rocky
capes and islands of the outer edge by a later Teutonic immigration
coming from Sweden.[492] So the largest continuous area of Negrito stock
in the Philippines is found in the Sierra Madre mountains defining the
eastern coast of northern Luzon.[493] Facing the neighborless wastes of
the Pacific, whence no new settler could come, turned away from the
sources of Malay immigration to the southwest, its location made it a
retreat, rather than a gateway to incoming races. [See map page 147.]
[Sidenote: Ethnic amalgamations in coastlands.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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