Note 213 — II A Sketch of the History of the Idea of Milieu Since the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

“Since his [Buckle’s] time much more has been done, not only in studying, as Buckle himself did, the immediate influence of climate and soil, but also in explaining the allied field of the effect of the fauna and the flora on social development. The subject of the domestication of animals, for instance, and its profound effect on human progress has not only been investigated by a number of recent students [especially E. Hahn, Die Haustiere u. ihre Beziehung zur Wirtschaft des Menschen, 1896], but has been made the very basis of the explanation of early American civilization by one of the most brilliant and most learned of recent historians [Payne, History of the New World called America; esp. vol. 1, bk. II]. A Russian scholar has shown in detail the connection between the great rivers and the progress of humanity, and the whole modern study of economic geography is but an expansion on broader lines of the same idea.”—Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History (N. Y.: The Columbia Univ. Press, 1902, 166 pp.), pp. 13 f.