Note 1451 — Chapter XVII · —The Influence Of Climate

Man grew in the temperate zone, was born in the Tropics. There, in his primitive, pre-civilized state, he lived in a moist, warm, uniform climate which supplied abundantly his simple wants, put no strain upon his feeble intellect and will. That first crude human product of Nature's Pliocene workshop turned out in the steaming lowland of Java, and now known to us as the Pithecanthropus erectus, found about him the climatic conditions generally conceded to have been necessary for man in his helpless, futile infancy. Where man has remained in the Tropics, with few exceptions he has suffered arrested development. His nursery has kept him a child. Though his initial progress depended upon the gifts which Nature put into his hands, his later evolution depended far more upon the powers which she developed within him. These have no limit, so far as our experience shows; but their growth is painful, reluctant. Therefore they develop only where Nature subjects man to compulsion, forces him to earn his daily bread, and thereby something more than bread. This compulsion is found in less luxurious but more salutary geographic conditions than the Tropics afford, in an environment that exacts a tribute of labor and invention in return for the boon of life, but offers a reward certain and generous enough to insure the accumulation of wealth which marks the beginning of civilization.1451