Chapter IV · (continued 2)

Appeal to the social geography of other countries, wherein the ethnic balance of power is differently distributed, may be directed against almost any of the phenomena we have instanced in France as seemingly of racial derivation. In the case either of suicide or divorce, if we turn from France to Italy or Germany, we instantly perceive all sorts of contradictions. The ethnic type, which is so immune from propensity to self-destruction or domestic disruption in France, becomes in Italy most prone to either mode of escape from temporary earthly ills. For each phenomenon culminates in frequency in the northern half of the latter country, stronghold of the Alpine race. Nor is there an appreciable infusion of Teutonism, physically speaking, herein, to account for the change of heart. Of course, it might be urged that this merely shows that the Mediterranean race of southern Italy is as much less inclined to the phenomenon than the Alpine race in these respects, as it in turn lags behind the Teuton. For it must be confessed that even in Italy neither divorce nor suicide is so frequent anywhere as in Teutonic northern France. Well, then, turn to Germany. Compare its two halves in these respects again. The northern half of the empire is most purely Teutonic by race; the southern is not distinguishable ethnically, as we have sought to prove, from central France. Bavaria, Baden, and Würtemberg are scarcely more Teutonic by race than Auvergne. Do we find differences in suicide, for example, following racial boundaries here? Far from it; for Saxony is its culminating center; and Saxony, as we know, is really half-Slavic at heart, as is also eastern Prussia. Suicide should be most frequent in Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover, if racial causes were appreciably operative. The argument, in fact, falls to pieces of its own weight, as Durkheim has shown. His conclusion is thus stated:

"If the Germans are more addicted to suicide, it is not because of the blood in their veins, but of the civilization in which they have been raised."

A summary view of the class of social phenomena seemingly characteristic of the distinct races in France, if we extend our field of vision to cover all Europe, suggests an explanation for the curious coincidences and parallelisms noted above, which is the exact opposite of the racial one.

Our theory, then, is this: that most of the social phenomena we have noted as peculiar to the areas occupied by the Alpine type are the necessary outcome, not of racial proclivities but rather of the geographical and social isolation characteristic of the habitat of this race. The ethnic type is still pure for the very same reason that social phenomena are primitive. Wooden ploughs pointed with stone, blood revenge, an undiminished birth-rate, and relative purity of physical type are all alike derivatives from a common cause, isolation, directly physical and coincidently social. We discover, primarily, an influence of environment where others perceive phenomena of ethnic inheritance.

4. Natural versus Vicinal Location in National Development[115]

In contradistinction to continental and intercontinental location, anthropogeography recognizes two other narrower meanings of the term. The innate mobility of the human race, due primarily to the eternal food-quest and increase of numbers, leads a people to spread out over a territory till they reach the barriers which nature has set up, or meet the frontiers of other tribes and nations. Their habitat or their specific geographic location is thus defined by natural features of mountain, desert, and sea, or by the neighbors whom they are unable to displace, or more often by both.

A people has, therefore, a twofold location, an immediate one, based upon their actual territory, and a mediate or vicinal one, growing out of its relations to the countries nearest them. The first is a question of the land under their feet; the other, of the neighbors about them. The first or natural location embodies the complex of local geographic conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an oasis, an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The stronger the vicinal location, the more dependent is the people upon the neighboring states, but the more potent the influence which it can, under certain circumstances, exert upon them. Witness Germany in relation to Holland, France, Austria, and Poland. The stronger the natural location, on the other hand, the more independent is the people and the more strongly marked is the national character. This is exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia, and Nepal; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain, and Scandinavia; and of islands like England and Japan. Today we stand amazed at that strong primordial brand of the Japanese character which nothing can blur or erase.

Clearly defined natural locations, in which barriers of mountains and sea draw the boundaries and guarantee some degree of isolation, tend to hold their people in a calm embrace, to guard them against outside interference and infusion of foreign blood, and thus to make them develop the national genius in such direction as the local geographic conditions permit. In the unceasing movements which have made up most of the historic and prehistoric life of the human race, in their migrations and counter-migrations, their incursions, retreats, and expansions over the face of the earth, vast unfenced areas, like the open lowlands of Russia and the grasslands of Africa, present the picture of a great thoroughfare swept by pressing throngs. Other regions, more secluded, appear as quiet nooks, made for a temporary halt or a permanent rest. Here some part of the passing human flow is caught as in a vessel and held till it crystallizes into a nation. These are the conspicuous areas of race characterization. The development of the various ethnic and political offspring of the Roman Empire in the naturally defined areas of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and France illustrates the process of national differentiation which goes on in such secluded-locations.

III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS

1 Isolation in Anthropogeography and Biology

A systematic treatise upon isolation as a sociological concept remains to be written. The idea of isolation as a tool of investigation has been fashioned with more precision in geography and in biology than in sociology.

Research in human geography has as its object the study of man in his relations to the earth. Students of civilization, like Montesquieu and Buckle, sought to explain the culture and behavior of peoples as the direct result of the physical environment. Friedrich Ratzel with his "thorough training as a naturalist, broad reading, and travel" and above all, his comprehensive knowledge of ethnology, recognized the importance of direct effects, such as cultural isolation. Jean Brunhes, by the selection of small natural units, his so-called "islands," has made intensive studies of isolated groups in the oases of the deserts of the Sub and of the Mzab, and in the high mountains of the central Andes.

Biology indicates isolation as one of the factors in the origin of the species. Anthropology derives the great races of mankind—the Caucasian, the Ethiopian, the Malay, the Mongolian, and the Indian—from geographical separation following an assumed prehistoric dispersion. A German scholar, Dr. Georg Gerland, has prepared an atlas which plots differences in physical traits, such as skin color and hair texture, as indicating the geographical distribution of races.

2. Isolation and Social Groups

Anthropogeographical and biological investigations have proceeded upon the assumption, implicit or explicit, that the geographic environment, and the physical and mental traits of races and individuals, determine individual and collective behavior. What investigations in human geography and heredity actually demonstrate is that the geographic environment and the original nature of man condition the culture and conduct of groups and of persons. The explanations of isolation, so far as it affects social life, which have gained currency in the writings of anthropologists and geographers, are therefore too simple. Sociologists are able to take into account forms of isolation not considered by the students of the physical environment and of racial inheritance. Studies of folkways, mores, culture, nationality, the products of a historical or cultural process, disclose types of social contact which transcend the barriers of geographical or racial separation, and reveal social forms of isolation which prevent communication where there is close geographical contact or common racial bonds.

The literature upon isolated peoples ranges from investigations of arrest of cultural development as, for example, the natives of Australia, the Mountain Whites of the southern states, or the inhabitants of Pitcairn Island to studies of hermit nations, of caste systems as in India, or of outcast groups such as feeble-minded "tribes" or hamlets, fraternities of criminals, and the underworld of commercialized prostitution. Special research in dialects, in folklore, and in provincialism shows how spatial isolation fixes differences in speech, attitudes, folkways, and mores which, in turn, enforce isolation even when geographic separation has disappeared.

The most significant contribution to the study of isolation from the sociological standpoint has undoubtedly been made by Fishberg in a work entitled The Jews, a Study of Race and Environment. The author points out that the isolation of the Jew has been the result of neither physical environment nor of race, but of social barriers. "Judaism has been preserved throughout the long years of Israel's dispersion by two factors: its separative ritualism, which prevented close and intimate contact with non-Jews, and the iron laws of the Christian theocracies of Europe which encouraged and enforced 'isolation.'"[116]

3. Isolation and Personality

Philosophers, mystics, and religious enthusiasts have invariably stressed privacy for meditation, retirement for ecstatic communion with God, and withdrawal from the contamination of the world. In 1784-86 Zimmermann wrote an elaborate essay in which he dilates upon "the question whether it is easier to live virtuously in society or in solitude," considering in Part I "the influence of occasional retirement upon the mind and the heart" and in Part II "the pernicious influence of a total exclusion from society upon the mind and the heart."

Actual research upon the effect of isolation upon personal development has more of future promise than of present accomplishment. The literature upon cases of feral men is practically all of the anecdotal type with observations by persons untrained in the modern scientific method. One case, however, "the savage of Aveyron" was studied intensively by Itard, the French philosopher and otologist who cherished high hopes of his mental and social development. After five years spent in a patient and varied but futile attempt at education, he confessed his bitter disappointment. "Since my pains are lost and efforts fruitless, take yourself back to your forest and primitive tastes; or if your new wants make you dependent on society, suffer the penalty of being useless, and go to Bicêtre, there to die in wretchedness."

Only second in importance to the cases of feral men are the investigations which have been made of the results of solitary confinement. Morselli, in his well-known work on Suicide, presented statistics showing that self-destruction was many times as frequent among convicts under the system of absolute isolation as compared with that of association during imprisonment. Studies of Auburn prison in New York, of Mountjoy in England, and penal institutions on the continent show the effects of solitary incarceration in the increase of cases of suicides, insanity, invalidism, and death.

Beginnings have been made in child study, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis of the effects of different types of isolation upon personal development. Some attention has been given to the study of effects upon mentality and personality of physical defects such as deaf-mutism and blindness. Students of the so-called "morally defective child," that is the child who appears deficient in emotional and sympathetic responses, suggest as a partial explanation the absence in infancy and early childhood of intimate and sympathetic contacts with the mother. An investigation not yet made but of decisive bearing upon this point will be a comparative study of children brought up in families with those reared in institutions.

Psychiatry and psychoanalysis in probing mental life and personality have related certain mental and social abnormalities to isolation from social contact. Studies of paranoia and of egocentric personalities have resulted in the discovery of the only or favorite child complex. The exclusion of the boy or girl in the one-child family from the give and take of democratic relations with brothers and sisters results, according to the theory advanced, in a psychopathic personality of the self-centered type. A contributing cause of homosexuality, it is said by psychoanalysts, is the isolation during childhood from usual association with individuals of the same sex. Research in dementia praecox discloses a symptom and probably a cause of this mental malady to be the withdrawal of the individual from normal social contacts and the substitution of an imaginary for a real world of persons and events. Dementia praecox has been related by one psychoanalyst to the "shut-in" type of personality.

The literature on the subject of privacy in its relation to personal development is fragmentary but highly promising for future research. The study of the introspective type of personality suggests that self-analysis is the counterpart of the inhibition of immediate and impulsive self-expression in social relations. Materials for an understanding of the relation of retirement and privacy to the aesthetic, moral, and creative life of the person may be found in the lives of hermits, inventors, and religious leaders; in the studies of seclusion, prayer, and meditation; and in research upon taboo, prestige, and attitudes of superiority and inferiority.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MATERIALS FOR THE STUDY OF ISOLATION

I. CHARACTERISTIC SENTIMENTS AND ATTITUDES OF THE ISOLATED PERSON

(1) Zimmermann, Johann G. Solitude. Or the effects of occasional retirement on the mind, the heart, general society. Translated from the German. London, 1827.

(2) Canat, René. Une forme du mal du siècle. Du sentiment de la solitude morale chez les romantiques et les parnassiens. Paris, 1904.

(3) Goltz, E. von der. Das Gebet in der aeltesten Christenheit. Leipzig, 1901.

(4) Strong, Anna L. A Consideration of Prayer from the Standpoint of Social Psychology. Chicago, 1908.

(5) Hoch, A. "On Some of the Mental Mechanisms in Dementia Praecox," Journal of Abnormal Psychology, V (1910), 255-73. [A study of the isolated person.]

(6) Bohannon, E. W. "Only Child," Pedagogical Seminary, V (1897-98), 475-96.

(7) Brill, A. A. Psychanalysis. Its theories and practical application. "The Only or Favorite Child in Adult Life," pp. 253-65. 2d rev. ed. Philadelphia and London, 1914.

(8) Neter, Eugen. Das einzige Kind und seine Erziehung. Ein ernstes Mahnwort an Eltern und Erzieher. München, 1914.

(9) Whiteley, Opal S. The Story of Opal. Boston, 1920.

(10) Delbrück, A. Die pathologische Lüge und die psychisch abnormen Schwindler. Stuttgart, 1891.

(11) Healy, Wm. Pathological Lying. Boston, 1915.

(12) Dostoévsky, F. The House of the Dead; or, Prison Life in Siberia. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. New York, 1915.

(13) Griffiths, Arthur. Secrets of the Prison House, or Gaol Studies and Sketches. I, 262-80. London, 1894.

(14) Kingsley, Charles. The Hermits. London and New York, 1871.

(15) Baring-Gould, S. Lives of Saints. 16 vols. Rev. ed. Edinburgh, 1916. [See references in index to hermits.]

(16) Solenberger, Alice W. One Thousand Homeless Men. A study of original records. Russell Sage Foundation. New York, 1911.

II. TYPES OF ISOLATION AND TYPES OF SOCIAL GROUPS

(1) Fishberg, Maurice. The Jews. A study of race and environment. London and New York, 1911.

(2) Gummere, Amelia M. The Quaker. A study in costume. Philadelphia, 1901.

(3) Webster, Hutton. Primitive Secret Societies. A study in early politics and religion. New York, 1908.

(4) Heckethorn, C. W. The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries. A comprehensive account of upwards of one hundred and sixty secret organizations—religious, political, and social—from the most remote ages down to the present time. 2 vols. New ed., rev. and enl. London, 1897.

(5) Fosbroke, Thomas D. British Monachism, or Manners and Customs of the Monks and Nuns of England. London, 1817.

(6) Wishart, Alfred W. A Short History of Monks and Monasteries. Trenton, N.J., 1900. [Chap. i, pp. 17-70, gives an account of the monk as a type of human nature.]

III. GEOGRAPHICAL ISOLATION AND CULTURAL AREAS

(1) Ratzel, Friedrich. Politische Geographie; oder, Die Geographie der Staaten, des Verkehres und des Krieges. 2d. ed. München, 1903.

(2) Semple, Ellen. Influences of Geographic Environment, on the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropogeography. Chap. xiii, "Island Peoples," pp. 409-72. New York, 1911. [Bibliography.]

(3) Brunhes, Jean. Human Geography. An attempt at a positive classification, principles, and examples. 2d ed. Translated from the French by T. C. LeCompte. Chicago, 1920. [See especially chaps. vi, vii, and viii, pp. 415-569.]

(4) Vallaux, Camille. La Mer. (Géographie Sociale.) Populations maritimes, migrations, pêches, commerce, domination de la mer, Chap. iii, "Les isles et l'insularité." Paris, 1908.

(5) Gerland, Georg. Atlas der Völkerkunde. Gotha, 1892. [Indicates the geographical distribution of differences in skin color, hair form, clothing, customs, languages, etc.]

(6) Ripley, William Z. The Races of Europe. A sociological study. New York, 1899.

(7) Campbell, John C. The Southern Highlander and His Homeland. New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1921. [Bibliography.]

(8) Barrow, Sir John. A Description of Pitcairn's Island and Its Inhabitants. With an authentic account of the mutiny of the ship "Bounty" and of the subsequent fortunes of the mutineers. New York, 1832.

(9) Routledge, Mrs. Scoresby. The Mystery of Easter Island. The story of an expedition. Chap. xx, "Pitcairn Island." London, 1919.

(10) Galpin, Charles J. Rural Life. New York, 1918.

IV. LANGUAGE FRONTIERS AND NATIONALITY

(1) Dominian, Leon. The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe. New York, 1917. [Bibliography, pp. 348-56.]

(2) Auerbach, Bertrand. Les Races et les nationalités en Autriche-Hongrie. 2d rev. ed. Paris, 1917.

(3) Bernhard, L. Das polnische Gemeinwesen im preussischen Staat. Die Polenfrage. Leipzig, 1910.

(4) Bourgoing, P. de. Les guerres d'idiome et de nationalité. Tableaux, esquisses, et souvenirs d'histoire contemporaine. Paris, 1849.

(5) Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XI, "The Growth of Nationalities." Cambridge, 1909.

(6) Meillet, A. "Les Langues et les Nationalités," Scientia, Vol. XVIII, (Sept., 1915), pp. 192-201.

(7) Pfister, Ch. "La limite de la langue française et de la langue allemande en Alsace-Lorraine," Considérations historiques. Bull. Soc. Géogr. de l'Est, Vol. XII, 1890.

(8) This, G. "Die deutsch-französische Sprachgrenze in Lothringen," Beiträge zur Landes- und Volkskunde von Elsass-Lothringen, Vol. I, Strassburg, 1887.

(9)——. "Die deutsch-französische Sprachgrenze in Elsass," ibid., 1888.

V. DIALECTS AS A FACTOR IN ISOLATION

(1) Babbitt, Eugene H. "College Words and Phrases," Dialect Notes, II (1900-1904), 3-70.

(2)——. "The English of the Lower Classes in New York City and Vicinity," Dialect Notes, Vol. I, Part ix, 1896.

(3)——. "The Geography of the Great Languages," World's Work, Feb. 15 (1907-8), 9903-7.

(4) Churchill, William. Beach-la-mar: the Jargon or Trade Speech of the Western Pacific. Washington, 1911.

(5) Dana, Richard H., Jr. A Dictionary of Sea Terms. London, 1841.

(6) Elliott, A.M. "Speech-Mixture in French Canada: English and French," American Journal of Philology, X (1889), 133.

(7) Flaten, Nils. "Notes on American-Norwegian with a Vocabulary," Dialect Notes, II (1900-1904), 115-26.

(8) Harrison, James A. "Negro-English," Transactions and Proceedings American Philological Association, XVI (1885), Appendix, pp. xxxi-xxxiii.

(9) Hempl, George. "Language-Rivalry and Speech-Differentiation in the Case of Race-Mixture," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. XXIX (1898), 31-47.

(10) Knortz, Karl. Amerikanische Redensarten und Volksgebräuche. Leipzig, 1907.

(11) Letzner, Karl. Wörterbuch der englischen Volkssprache Australiens und der englischen Mischsprachen. Halle, 1891.

(12) Pettman, Charles. Africanderisms. A glossary of South African colloquial words and phrases and of place and other names. London and New York, 1913.

(13) Ralph, Julian. "The Language of the Tenement-Folk," Harper's Weekly, XLI (Jan. 23, 1897), 90.

(14) Skeat, Walter W. English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day. Cambridge, 1911.

(15) Yule, Henry, and Burnell, A. C. Hobson-Jobson. A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical, and discursive; new ed. by Wm. Crooke, London, 1903.

VI. PHYSICAL DEFECT AS A FORM OF ISOLATION

(1) Bell, Alexander G. "Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race." National Academy of Sciences, Memoirs, II, 177-262. Washington, D.C., 1884.

(2) Fay, Edward A. Marriages of the Deaf in America. An inquiry concerning the results of marriages of the deaf in America. Washington, D.C., 1893.

(3) Desagher, Maurice. "La timidité chez les aveugles," Revue philosophique, LXXVI (1913), 269-74.

(4) Best, Harry. The Deaf. Their position in society and the provision for their education in the United States. New York, 1914.

(5) ——. The Blind. Their condition and the work being done for them in the United States. New York, 1919.

VII. FERAL MEN

(1) Rauber, August. Homo Sapiens Ferus; oder, Die Zustände der Verwilderten und ihre Bedeutung für Wissenschaft, Politik, und Schule. Leipzig, 1885.

(2) Seguin, Edward. Idiocy and Its Treatment by the Physiological Method. Pp. 14-23. New York, 1866.

(3) Bonnaterre, J. P. Notice historique sur le sauvage de l'Aveyron, et sur quelques autres individus qu'on a trouvés dans les forêts à différentes époques. Paris, 1800.

(4) Itard, Jean E. M. G. De l'éducation d'un homme sauvage, et des premiers developpemens physiques et moraux du jeune sauvage de l'Aveyron. Pp. 45-46. Paris, 1801.

(5) Feuerbach, Paul J. A. von. Caspar Hauser. An account of an individual kept in a dungeon from early childhood, to about the age of seventeen. Translated from the German by H. G. Linberg. London, 1834.

(6) Stanhope, Philip Henry [4th Earl]. Tracts relating to Caspar Hauser. Translated from the original German. London, 1836.

(7) Lang, Andrew. Historical Mysteries. London, 1904.

(8) Tredgold, A. F. Mental Deficiency. "Isolation Amentia," pp. 297-305. 3d rev. ed. New York, 1920.

TOPICS FOR WRITTEN THEMES

1. Isolation as a Condition of Originality.

2. The Relation of Social Contact and of Isolation to Historic Inventions and Discoveries, as the Law of Gravitation, Mendelian Inheritance, the Electric Light, etc.

3. Isolated Types: the Hermit, the Mystic, the Prophet, the Stranger, and the Saint.

4. Isolation, Segregation, and the Physically Defective: as the Blind, the Deaf-Mute, the Physically Handicapped.

5. Isolated Areas and Cultural Retardation: the Southern Mountaineer, Pitcairn Islanders, the Australian Aborigines.

6. "Moral" Areas, Isolation, and Segregation: City Slums, Vice Districts, "Breeding-places of Crime."

7. The Controlled versus the Natural process of Segregation of the Feeble-minded.

8. Isolation and Insanity.

9. Privacy in the Home.

10. Isolation and Prestige.

11. Isolation as a Defence against the Invasion of Personality.

12. Nationalism as a Form of Isolation.

13. Biological and Social Immunity: or Biological Immunity from Infection, Personal or Group Immunity against Social Contagion.

14. The Only Child.

15. The Pathological Liar Considered from the Point of View of Isolation.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Is the distinction between isolation and social contact relative or absolute?

2. What illustrations of the various forms of isolation, spatial, structural, habitudinal, and psychical, occur to you?

3. By what process does isolation cause racial differentiation?

4. What is the relation of endogamy and exogamy (a) to isolation, and (b) to the establishment of a successful stock or race?

5. In what ways do the Jews and the Americans as racial types illustrate the effects of isolation and of contact?

6. What do you understand to be Bacon's definition of solitude?

7. What is the point in the saying "A great town is a great solitude"?

8. What is the sociology of the creation by a solitary person of imaginary companions?

9. Under what conditions does an individual prefer solitude to society? Give illustrations.

10. What are the devices used in prayer to secure isolation?

11. "Prayer has value in that it develops the essentially social form of personal self-realization." Explain.

12. What are the interrelations of social contact and of privacy in the development of the ideal self?

13. What do you understand by the relation of erudition to originality?

14. In what ways does isolation (a) promote, (b) impede, originality? What other factors beside isolation are involved in originality?

15. What is the value of privacy?

16. What was the value of the monasteries?

17. What conclusions do you derive from the study of the cases of feral men? Do these cases bear out the theory of Aristotle in regard to the effect of isolation upon the individual?

18. What is the significance of Helen Keller's account of how she broke through the barriers of isolation?

19. What were the mental effects of solitude described by Hudson? How do you explain the difference between the descriptions of the effect of solitude in the accounts given by Rousseau and by Hudson?

20. How does Galpin explain the relation of isolation to the development of the "rural mind"?

21. What are the effects of isolation upon the young man or young woman reared in the country?

22. Was Lincoln the product of isolation or of social contact?

23. To what extent are rural problems the result of isolation?

24. What do you understand by Thomas' statement, "The savage, the Negro, the peasant, the slum dwellers, and the white woman are notable sufferers by exclusion"?

25. What other of the subtler forms of isolation occur to you?

26. Is isolation to be regarded as always a disadvantage?

27. What do you understand by segregation as a process?

28. Give illustrations of groups other than those mentioned which have become segregated as a result of isolation.

29. How would you describe the process by which isolation leads to the segregation of the feeble-minded?

30. Why does a segregated group, like the feeble-minded, become an isolated group?

31. What are other illustrations of isolation resulting from segregation?

32. How would you compare Europe with the other continents with reference to number and distribution of isolated areas?

33. What do you understand to be the nature of the influence of the cradle land upon "the historical race"?

34. What illustrations from the Great War would you give of the effects (a) of central location; (b) of peripheral location?

35. How do you explain the contrast between the characteristics of the inhabitants of the Grecian inland and maritime cities?

36. To what extent may (a) the rise of the Greek city state, (b) Grecian intellectual development, and (c) the history of Greece, be interpreted in terms of geographic isolation?

37. To what extent can you explain the cultural retardation of Africa, as compared with European progress, by isolation?

38. Does race or isolation explain more adequately the following cultural differences for the several areas of France—divorce, intensity of suicide, distribution of awards, relative frequency of men of letters?

39. What is the relation of village and city emigration and immigration to isolation?

40. What is the difference between a natural and a vicinal location?

41. In what ways does isolation affect national development?

42. What is the relation of geographical position in area to literature?

FOOTNOTES: