THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CENTRAL ASIA 11
lower, has less rainfall, and bears only a sparse growth of grass in the early spring, we at once bring in the element of relation between the organic and the inorganic, and the study becomes geography. For the purposes of geography, it is only necessary to understand enough of the plateau, the plain, and the grass to gain a clear conception of how the one acts on the other. If animals inhabit the country, they must be such as can live on grass, or can prey on their grass-eating companions. Further, if the plain is waterless in summer, and the plateau is deeply buried in snow in winter, the animals must perforce migrate, and a new geographic factor is introduced. When man enters the region, he finds it too dry in one part and too cold in another for agriculture. Hence he must live upon animals, either as a hunter, or, when the population becomes a little denser and the wild animals diminish in number, as a shepherd. In either case he must wander from place to place. Such a nomadic life induces certain habits as to cleanliness, eating, traveling, sleeping, working, resting, and the like. The habits in turn develop certain moral qualities, such as gluttony alternating with abstemiousness, hardihood under physical difficulties, laziness, hospitality, and others. Thus the physical features of the region give rise to certain kinds of vegetation, which in turn determine the species and movements of animals, and so cause man to adopt the nomadic life. And man, because he happens to be a pastoral nomad, develops certain habits, physical, mental, and moral, which, taken together, constitute character. Geography, it seems to me, cannot logically be content, as many geographers would have it, with the mere description of physi-
IIIFカラー高解像度
