Note 302 — Chapter VI · —Geographical Area

Hence the wide area which Darwin found to be most favorable to improved variation and rapid evolution in animals, operates to the same end in human development, and its influence becomes a law of anthropo-geography. It permeates the higher aspects of life. The wide, varied area occupied by the Germanic tribes of Europe permitted the evolution of the many dialects which finally made the richness of modern German speech. English has gained in vocabulary and idiom with every expansion of its area. New territories mean to a people new pursuits, new relations, new wants; and all these become reflected in their speech. Languages, like peoples, cease to grow with national stagnation.302 To such stagnation movement or expansion is the surest antidote. America will in time make its contribution to the English tongue. The rich crop of slang that springs up on the frontier is not wholly to be deplored. The crudeness and vigor of cowboy speech are marks of youth: they are also promises of growth. Language can not live by dictionary alone. It tends to form new variants with every change of habitat. The French of the Canadian habitant has absorbed Indian and English words, and adapted old terms to new uses;303 but it is otherwise a survival of seventeenth century French. Boer speech in South Africa shows the same thing—absorption of new Kaffir and English words, coupled with marks of retardation due to isolation. Religion in the same way gains by wide dispersal. Christianity is one thing in St. Petersburg, another among the Copts of Cairo, another in Rome, another in London, and yet another in Boston. Buddhism takes on a different color in Ceylon, Tibet, China and Japan. In religion as in other phases of human development, differentiation must mean eventual enrichment, a larger content of the religious idea, to which each faith makes its contribution.