America. In the most southern parts of this continent we meet what is probably the most difficult problem of all: the agreement between north and south which Erland Nordenskiöld has repeatedly pointed out and which is to be seen in such dissimilar elements as huts with entrance passageways, arrows with three feathers, the carrying cradle etc. Ethnography is for the present unable to solve this problem, and presumably only the most thorough study of both continents will make it possible to disperse the prevailing darkness.
This work having thus been characterised as both a description and an analysis, as an explanation of the effects of environment and outside influences, as an application of geographical and ethnographical methods, it may be doubtful whether, according to ordinary usages of speech, it ought to be called ethnographical (i. e. historical) or geographical. It is neither of them or rather, it is something of both. In some chapters the geographical points of view, in others the historical, will appear most prominently. We are working along a border area. In reality, all geography may be regarded historically, for how old must a phenomenon be in order to come in under the label of history? Every geographical process of adaptation is also a historical event, and, on the other hand, many historical events are in their origin geographically conditioned. And, indeed, nothing is more natural, for no inductive science is self-contained. One of France's greatest modern geographers rightly says: "En réalité, la limitation exacte du champ des investigations géographiques est une enterprise chimérique. Cette science touche à trop de sciences et elle a, son histoire le prouve, trop d'intérêt à rester en contact avec elles pour qu'on puisse même désirer cette limitation".[1] Just as vague is the boundary of the ethnographical sciences. Haddon says somewhere that those who really feel some inconvenience on account of this uncertainty are cataloguers and librarians.[2] Only an Englishman could utter a sentence containing so much common sense. To what purpose at all is that mental line between cultural and natural science, a division which may perhaps be practical, but under no circumstance is essential? Our own culture and the culture of all nations have quietly grown up out of the earth as naturally as the tree unfolds its leaves.[3] The history of culture is the natural history of the develop-
- ↑ de Martonne 1920; 21. And in reality the boundary which Ratzel (1909–12; I 62 seq.) draws for human geography is nothing but consideration for the practical. Cf. also Brunhes 1925; II 753 seqq.
- ↑ Haddon 1910; 3.
- ↑ As to this we dare not doubt. How it is possible, in view of the presuppositions of the human psyche, is the task of social psychology to show. “And of this task the primary and most essential part is the showing how the life of highly organised societies, involving as it does high moral qualities of character and con-
