the river lowlands of France. Moreover, French men of letters, by the
distribution of their birthplaces, are essentially products of fluvial
valleys and plains, rarely of upland and mountain.[20]

This contrast has been ascribed to a fundamental ethnic distinction
between the Teutonic population of the lowlands and the Alpine or Celtic
stock which survives in the isolation of highland and peninsula, thus
making talent an attribute of race. But the Po Valley of northern Italy,
whose population contains a strong infusion of this supposedly
stultifying Alpine blood, and the neighboring lowlands and hill country
of Tuscany show an enormous preponderance of intellectual and artistic
power over the highlands of the peninsula.[21] Hence the same contrast
appears among different races under like geographic conditions.
Moreover, in France other social phenomena, such as suicide, divorce,
decreasing birth-rate, and radicalism in politics, show this same
startling parallelism of geographic distribution,[22] and these cannot
be attributed to the stimulating or depressing effect of natural scenery
upon the human mind.

Mountain regions discourage the budding of genius because they are areas
of isolation, confinement, remote from the great currents of men and
ideas that move along the river valleys. They are regions of much labor
and little leisure, of poverty to-day and anxiety for the morrow, of
toil-cramped hands and toil-dulled brains. In the fertile alluvial
plains are wealth, leisure, contact with many minds, large urban centers
where commodities and ideas are exchanged. The two contrasted
environments produce directly certain economic and social results,
which, in turn, become the causes of secondary intellectual and artistic
effects. The low mountains of central Germany which von Treitschke cites
as homes of poets and artists, owing to abundant and varied mineral