tle, horses, sheep, and swine.[71] While
the vocabulary of Malays and Polynesians is especially rich in nautical
terms, the Kirghis shepherd tribes who wander over the highlands of
western Asia from the Tian Shan to the Hindu Kush have four different
terms for four kinds of mountain passes. A _daban_ is a difficult, rocky
defile; an _art_ is very high and dangerous; a _bel_ is a low, easy
pass, and a _kutal_ is a broad opening between low hills.[72]

To such influences man is a passive subject, especially in the earlier
stages of his development; but there are more important influences
emanating from his environment which affect him as an active agent,
challenge his will by furnishing the motives for its exercise, give
purpose to his activities, and determine the direction which they shall
take.[73] These mold his mind and character through the media of his
economic and social life, and produce effects none the less important
because they are secondary. About these anthropo-geography can reach
surer conclusions than regarding direct psychical effects, because it
can trace their mode of operation as well as define the result. Direct
psychical effects are more matters of conjecture, whose causation is
asserted rather than proved. They seem to float in the air, detached
from the solid ground under foot, and are therefore subject matter for
the psychologist rather than the geographer.

[Sidenote: The great man in history.]

What of the great man in this geographical interpretation of history? It
seems to take no account of him, or to put him into the melting-pot with
the masses. Both are to some extent true. As a science,
anthropo-geography can deal only with large averages, and these exclude
or minimize the exceptional individual. Moreover, geographic conditions
which give this or that bent to a nation's purposes and determine its
aggregate activities have a similar effect upon the individual; but he
may institute a far-seeing policy, to whose wisdom only gradually is the
people awakened. The acts of the great man are rarely arbitrary or
artificial; he accelerates or retards the normal course of development,
but cannot turn it counter to the channels of natural conditions. As a
rule he is a product of the same forces that made his people. He moves
with them and is followed by them under a common impulse. Daniel Boone,
that picturesque figure leading the van of the westward movement over
the Allegheny Mountains, was born