The latter party, however, by no means insist that the environment is indifferent. They would entirely agree with Professor Wundt, that purely psychological laws are inadequate to explain the events of history, and that we must constantly take into account the associated physical conditions in order correctly to tell the story of human development. They would not deny that in some remote and invisible past the racial mind, like the racial anatomy, must have absorbed its permanent characteristics from local impressions; but this once accomplished, they would argue, both orders of characteristics became ineffaceable. Even the most determined of the “anthropo-geographers” will not deny that the power over the mind which they attribute to geographical features diminishes in proportion as culture increases, to the extent that it is no longer coercive in civilised life. Nor can anyone who reflects be blind to the fact that the sameness brought about by subjection to given geographical conditions is something very different from the unity produced by mental association. The decision of this debated question presents itself to me in a light which I have not seen stated by previous writers. Both parties are right. We must agree with Hegel that the most lovely and advantageous spots on earth fail to develop their inhabitants; and yet, where such development takes place, we can always point to the geographic conditions which have alone rendered it possible. In reality, the question is one only indirectly of geography. It belongs, directly, in quite another department of research, that of Economics, the science of the production and distribution of material wealth. No matter how fertile the soil, how inviting the waterways, how smiling the skies, man will remain amid it all the savage of the prime unless he have within him the psychical stimulus to make use of these for the increase of his wealth; and that stimulus comes not from without. Material wealth is as much a condition of mental growth as is bodily nutrition, but is just as far as is the latter from being either a synonym or a measure of such growth. It is a prerequisite, not a correlate. The application of this principle explains the discrepant facts which have led to the conflict of opinions in anthropo-geography. Without geographic facilities, a nation cannot become wealthy; and without wealth it is even more at a disadvantage than the individual. Poverty and riches are what most influence the fate of men and nations. Armuth ist die grösste Plage, Reichthum ist das höchste Gut. GOETHE. Life itself is a question not merely of means, but of ample means. In central England the rich have an average longevity of forty-nine years, the poor but twenty-five years; in Berlin the rich live fifty years, and the poor thirty-two years (Farr, Kolb).