of historical
development. It would be impossible to explain the history and national
character of the contemporary English solely by their twentieth century
response to their environment, because with insular conservatism they
carry and cherish vestiges of times when their islands represented
different geographic relations from those of to-day. Witness the
wool-sack of the lord chancellor. We cannot understand the location of
modern Athens, Rome or Berlin from the present day relations of urban
populations to their environment, because the original choice of these
sites was dictated by far different considerations from those ruling
to-day. In the history of these cities a whole succession of geographic
factors have in turn been active, each leaving its impress of which the
cities become, as it were, repositories.

[Sidenote: Effect of a previous habitat.]

The importance of this time element for a solution of
anthropo-geographic problems becomes plainer, where a certain locality
has received an entirely new population, or where a given people by
migration change their habitat. The result in either case is the same, a
new combination, new modifications superimposed on old modifications.
And it is with this sort of case that anthropo-geography most often has
to deal. So restless has mankind been, that the testimony of history and
ethnology is all against the assumption that a social group has ever
been subjected to but one type of environment during its long period of
development from a primitive to a civilized society. Therefore, if we
assert that a people is the product of the country which it inhabits at
a given time, we forget that many different countries which its forbears
occupied have left their mark on the present race in the form of
inherited aptitudes and traditional customs acquired in those remote
ancestral habitats. The Moors of Granada had passed through a wide range
of ancestral experiences; they bore the impress of Asia, Africa and
Europe, and on their expulsion from Spain carried back with them to
Morocco traces of their peninsula life.

A race or tribe develops certain characteristics in a certain region,
then moves on, leaving the old abode but not all the accretions of
custom, social organization and economic method there acquired. These
travel on with the migrant people; some are dropped, others are
preserved because of utility, sentiment or mere habit. For centuries
after the settlement of the J