The races of Europe : a sociological study (Lowell Institute lectures) / by William Z. Ripley.

  • William Zebina Ripley
Date:
[1899]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The races of Europe : a sociological study (Lowell Institute lectures) / by William Z. Ripley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    constant illustration of this fact even in the smallest details. ' It is only when we come to study peoples in more advanced stages of culture that we find environment marking the line of cleavage between two opposing views. One set of think- ers—Ward, for example, in his Dynamic Sociology f—affirms that at a certain point natural selection seizes upon mind as the dominant and vital factor in progress. Society passes from the “ natural ” to the “ artificial ” stage. Based upon this thesis, the study of environment, and even of race, becomes more and more retrospective—even, so to speak, archaeo- logical. The opponents of this optimistic view take the ground that civilization is merely a result of adaptation to environment, physical as well as political. Once more to quote Mr. Bryce : “ The very multiplication of the means at his [man’s] dis- posal for profiting by what Nature supplies, brings him into ever closer and more complex relations with her. The vari- ety of her resources, differing in different regions, prescribes the kind of industry for which each spot is fitted; and the competition of nations, growing always keener, forces each to maintain itself in the struggle by using to the utmost every facility for the production or for the transportation of products.” I It would be easy to multiply examples of the effect of progress in thus compelling specialization—the utilization of each advantage to the last degree—thus illustrating the force of environment even in the highest civilization. When the vine was introduced into California the settlers tried to cul- tivate it in the north and in the south, along the rivers and on the hillsides, near the coast and in the interior. The grape rapidly took root and grew, but its very prosperity in some * This is ingeniously worked out by Shaler in his Nature and Man in North America. f Cf. Patten’s Theory of Social Forces, in his discussion of race and physical environment. I A new chapter on this subject added to the third edition of The American Commonwealth, ii, p. 450. The same view is well expressed by Strachey in Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc., xxi, p. 209 et seq.\ by Geikie in ibid., 1S79, p. 442, and in Macmillan’s Magazine for March, 1SS2.
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