ece of the earth. Or when his admirers, anxious to improve on
this, after distinguishing the atmosphere or air, the hydrosphere or
water, the lithosphere or crust, and the centrosphere or interior mass,
proceed to add that man is the most active portion of an intermittent
biosphere, or living envelope of our planet, I cannot feel that the
last word has been said about him.

[Footnote 3: Thus the reader of the present work should not fail to
study also Dr. Marion Newbigin's _Geography_ in this series.]

Or, again, listen for a moment to M. Demolins, author of a very
suggestive book, _Comment la route cree le type social_ ("How the road
creates the social type"). "There exists," he says in his preface,
"on the surface of the terrestrial globe an infinite variety of peoples.
What is the cause that has created this variety? In general the reply
is, Race. But race explains nothing; for it remains to discover what
has produced the diversity of races. Race is not a cause; it is a
consequence. The first and decisive cause of the diversity of peoples
and of the diversity of races is the road that the peoples have followed.
It is the road that creates the race, and that creates the social type."
And he goes further: "If the history of humanity were to recommence,
and the surface of the globe had not been transformed, this history
would repeat itself in its main lines. There might well be secondary
differences, for example, in certain manifestations of public life,
in political revolutions, to which we assign far too great an
importance; but the same roads would reproduce the same social types,
and would impose on them the same essential characters."

There is no contending with a pious opinion, especially when it takes
the form of an unverifiable prophecy. Let the level-headed
anthropologist beware, however, lest he put all his eggs into one
basket. Let him seek to give each factor in the problem its due. Race
must count for something, or why do not the other animals take a leaf
out of our book and build up rival civilizations on suitable sites?
Why do men herd cattle, instead of the cattle herding the men? We are
rational beings, in other words, because we have it in us to be rational
beings. Again, culture, with the intelligence and choice it involves,
counts for something too. It is easy to argue that, since there were
the Asiatic steppes with the wild horses ready to hand in them, man
was bound sooner or later to tame the h