less incitative of progress.

Although the broad facts of history are known to us the causes that have
contributed in the past to keep down some races while other peoples who
were no better endowed or situated rose to the greatest heights of human
effort cannot be stated with certainty. It is easy to cite the
circumstances that are commonly conjectured as accounting for the origin
and growth of civilisation, such as soil, climate and geographical
position, but it is equally easy to point to times and places when and
where great civilisations have arisen under conditions that have
concurred elsewhere with miserable stagnation in rude barbarism.

Climate is, perhaps, the factor which is most generally condescended
upon as being the chief of the causes that contribute to that
collective accomplishment which we call civilisation, but the connection
between the two things is far from clear, indeed it seems to be often
negatived by actual facts. Seeing, for instance, that the easy fruition
of desire which is possible in tropical and sub-tropical latitudes does
away with the idea of necessity as the mother of invention in those
parts of the world it becomes difficult to see how tool-using man, who
is generally supposed to have originated somewhere in the warm belts,
came to take the first and the most difficult steps in the upward
progress where there was so little, if any, incentive to that sustained
effort and concentration of the mind which is required for the thinking
out of the most difficult of all thoughts, the first principles of any
art or craft. Why, we may well ask, should the primitive African have
worried about cultivating the soil where edible roots and berries
abounded? Why should he have bothered about making fire where there was
no need of artificial warmth or for the cooking of food? Why should he
have cudgeled his brains to fashion weapons and to contrive snares for