to continental and intercontinental location,
anthropogeography recognizes two other narrower meanings of the term.
The innate mobility of the human race, due primarily to the eternal
food-quest and increase of numbers, leads a people to spread out over a
territory till they reach the barriers which nature has set up, or meet
the frontiers of other tribes and nations. Their habitat or their
specific geographic location is thus defined by natural features of
mountain, desert, and sea, or by the neighbors whom they are unable to
displace, or more often by both.

A people has, therefore, a twofold location, an immediate one, based
upon their actual territory, and a mediate or vicinal one, growing out
of its relations to the countries nearest them. The first is a question
of the land under their feet; the other, of the neighbors about them.
The first or natural location embodies the complex of local geographic
conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national
existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an
oasis, an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The
stronger the vicinal location, the more dependent is the people upon the
neighboring states, but the more potent the influence which it can,
under certain circumstances, exert upon them. Witness Germany in
relation to Holland, France, Austria, and Poland. The stronger the
natural location, on the other hand, the more independent is the people
and the more strongly marked is the national character. This is
exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia,
and Nepal; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain, and Scandinavia; and of
islands like England and Japan. Today we stand amazed at that strong
primordial brand of the Japanese character which nothing can blur or
erase.

Clearly defined natural locations, in which barriers of mountains and
sea draw the boundaries and guarantee some degree of isolation, tend to
hold their people in a calm embrace, to guard them against outside
interference and infusion of foreign blood, and thus to make them
develop the national genius in such direction as the local geographic
conditions permit. In the unceasing movements which have made up most of
the historic and prehistoric life of the human race, in their migrations
and counter-migrations, their incursions, retreats, and expansions over
the face of the earth, vast unfenced areas, like the open lowlands of
Russia and the