of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herd gives him leisure for contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert and the grass of the steppe, stretching on and on without break or change.  Chewing over and over the cud of his simple belief as the one food of his unfed mind, his faith becomes fanaticism; his big spacial ideas, born of that ceaseless regular wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests.

Man can no more be scientifically studied apart from the ground which he tills, or the lands over which he travels, or the seas over which he trades, than polar bear or desert cactus can be understood apart from its habitat.  Man’s relations to his environment are infinitely more numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or animal.  So complex are they that they constitute a legitimate and necessary object of special study.  The investigation which they receive in anthropology, ethnology, sociology and history is piecemeal and partial, limited as to the race, cultural development, epoch, country or variety of geographic conditions taken into account.  Hence all these sciences, together with history so far as history undertakes to explain the causes of events, fail to reach a satisfactory solution of their problems largely because the geographic factor which enters into them all has not been thoroughly analyzed.  Man has been so noisy about the way he has “conquered Nature,” and Nature has been so silent in her persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the equation of human development has been overlooked.

[Sidenote:  Stability of geographic factors in history.]

In every problem of history there are two main factors, variously stated as heredity and environment, man and his geographic conditions, the internal forces of race and the external forces of habitat.  Now the geographic element in the long history of human development has been operating strongly and operating persistently.  Herein lies its importance.  It is a stable force.  It never sleeps.  This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—­shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man.

[Sidenote:  Persistent effect of remoteness.]