ects.]

II. More varied and important are the psychical effects of geographic
environment. As direct effects they are doubtless bound up in many
physiological modifications; and as influences of climate, they help
differentiate peoples and races in point of temperament. They are
reflected in man's religion and his literature, in his modes of thought
and figures of speech. Blackstone states that "in the Isle of Man, to
take away a horse or ox was no felony, but a trespass, because of the
difficulty in that little territory to conceal them or to carry them
off; but to steal a pig or a fowl, which is easily done, was a capital
misdemeanour, and the offender punished with death." The judges or
deemsters in this island of fishermen swore to execute the laws as
impartially "as the herring's backbone doth lie in the middle of the
fish."[68] The whole mythology of the Polynesians is an echo of the
encompassing ocean. The cosmography of every primitive people, their
first crude effort in the science of the universe, bears the impress of
their habitat. The Eskimo's hell is a place of darkness, storm and
intense cold;[69] the Jew's is a place of eternal fire. Buddha, born in
the steaming Himalayan piedmont, fighting the lassitude induced by heat
and humidity, pictured his heaven as Nirvana, the cessation of all
activity and individual life.

[Sidenote: Indirect effect upon language]

Intellectual effects of environment may appear in the enrichment of a
language in one direction to a rare nicety of expression; but this may
be combined with a meager vocabulary in all other directions. The
greatest cattle-breeders among the native Africans, such as the Hereros
of western Damaraland and the Dinkas of the upper White Nile, have an
amazing choice of words for all colors describing their animals--brown,
dun, red, white, dapple, and so on in every gradation of shade and hue.
The Samoyedes of northern Russia have eleven or twelve terms to
designate the various grays and browns of their reindeer, despite their
otherwise low cultural development.[70] The speech of nomads has an
abundance of expressions for cattle in every relation of life. It
includes different words for breeding, pregnancy, death, and
slaughtering in relation to every different kind of domestic animal. The
Magyars, among whom pastoral life still survives on the low plains of
the Danube and Theiss, have a generic word for herd, _csorda_, and
special terms for herds of cat