Differences in mere _area_, a matter of square miles, materially modify the ethnic mind. Great men are not born in small islands. The less the area of a state, the less the variety of its life, the fewer the stimuli to thought and emotion, the narrower the range of observation. The ethnographer Gerland attributes the mental degeneracy of the Polynesians, compared to their cognates, the Malays, directly to the much smaller islands which they were obliged to inhabit. Mere _number_ acts in a similar manner on the _psyche_. A nation of many millions has greater self-confidence; each citizen feels its power strengthening his own courage, his faith is firmer in what so many believe, and he is the readier to labour for aims which so many admire. The relation of the area to the number yields the _density_ of the population, which, with its collateral condition of _distribution_, is a ruling factor in ethnic life. I have placed the geographic features which favour or impede intercommunication first on the list of those which modify the ethnic mind; and designedly so. In the philosophic study of human development the social and anti-social factors demand our first attention. A man becomes man only as one of many. Nothing so lames progress as isolation; nothing so hastens it as good company; and I am fain to endorse the proverb that bad company is better than none. Rapid transportation is the key to the phenomenal growth of the nineteenth century: transportation of weight by steam, of thought by electricity. The Romans knew the value of good roads and made the best which have ever been constructed; the Phœnicians and Greeks won their pre-eminence, not by the resources of their home provinces, but by their skill as sailors. _The Soil._—Next and second in deciding the history and character of a people comes the nature of the soil, the earth, on which they live. Its value is to them in what it yields, either spontaneously or by labour. The primitive man contented himself with the former; but culture came along when toil entered. For culture ever demands an effort greater than that immediately necessary for existence, because its aim, from first to last, is directed to the future; and the higher the culture, the more distant is that future. Even the earliest men levied tribute on all the realms of nature. The cave-dwellers of the Gironde caught fishes and trapped beasts; they gathered nuts and edible roots; and they sought diligently for the stones best adapted to lance-points and scrapers. All this we know from the remains left in their rock-shelters. They utilised the soil to the full extent of their knowledge and wants.