Climate : considered especially in relation to man / by Robert de Courcy Ward.

  • Robert DeCourcy Ward
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Climate : considered especially in relation to man / by Robert de Courcy Ward. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    highest development of the human race, not where life is easiest, but in extra-tropical latitudes, are significant. 44 Slowly but surely,” as Benjamin Kidd says [Control of the Tropics, 51—52], 44 we see the seat of empire and au¬ thority moving like the advancing tide northward. The evolution of character which the race has undergone has been northwards from the tropics. . . . Underneath all the outward national quarrels of ‘Europe there has been going on for centuries what is really a struggle between what we might call the Latin type of civilisation, represented by the southern races, and that type of civilisation which has been developed in northern Europe.” From the Mediterranean region, where the world’s civilisation, its commerce, and its power were long centred, westward through Spain and Portugal, the migration continued farther and farther north in Europe, until Holland and then England became the dominant power. From lands of more genial cli¬ mates to lands of colder and longer winters, but also of the most active and energetic races, the migration has taken place. The advance of Christianity, from its origin in the subtropical belt of Eurasia into higher latitudes, has been pointed to as another illustration of the same tendency. Together with this northward tendency of civilisation there has run through the past an equatorward movement, already noted in the case of the tropics, of the stronger peoples of the north toward the milder and more genial southern latitudes, involving historical events of great importance.