iginated; thus, even in our
domesticated animals and plants, we find that varieties created under
favorable conditions, obtaining their inheritances in suitable
conditions, may then flourish in many conditions of environment in which
they could not by any chance have originated. The barnyard creatures of
Europe, with their established qualities, may be taken to Australia, and
there retain their nature for many generations; even where the form
falls away from the parent stock, the decline is generally slow and may
not for a great time become apparent.

This fixity of race characteristics has enabled the several national
varieties of men to go forth from their nurseries, carrying the
qualities bred in their earlier conditions through centuries of life in
other climes. The Gothic blood of Italy and of Spain still keeps much of
its parent strength; the Aryan's of India, though a world apart in its
conditions from those which gave it character in its cradle, is still,
in many of its qualities, distinctly akin to that of the home people.
Moor, Hun and Turk--all the numerous folk we find in the present
condition of the world so far from their cradle-lands--are still to a
great extent what their primitive nurture made them. On this rigidity
which comes to mature races in the lower life as well as in man, depends
the vigor with which they do their appointed work.

2. Geographical Isolation and Maritime Contact[113]

Greece, considering its limited total extent, offers but little motive,
and still less of convenient means, for internal communication among its
various inhabitants. Each village or township occupying its plain with
the inclosing mountains, supplied its own main wants, whilst the
transport of commodities by land was sufficiently difficult to
discourage greatly any regular commerce with neighbors. In so far as the
face of the interior country was concerned, it seemed as if nature had
been disposed from the beginning to keep the population of Greece
socially and politically disunited by providing so many hedges of
separation and so many boundaries, generally hard, sometimes impossible,
to overleap. One special motive to intercourse, however, arose out of
this very geographical constitution of the country, and its endless
alternation of mountain and valley. The difference of climate and
temperature between the high and low grounds is very great; the harvest
is secured in one place before it is ripe in another, and t