natural science in Babylonia and Egypt was not a result of environment
but of the institutions and education of those countries.[26] But here
arise the questions, how far custom and education in their turn depend
upon environment; to what degree natural conditions, molding economic
and political development, may through them fundamentally affect social
customs, education, culture, and the dominant intellectual aptitudes of
a people. It is not difficult to see, back of the astronomy and
mathematics and hydraulics of Egypt, the far off sweep of the rain-laden
monsoons against the mountains of Abyssinia and the creeping of the
tawny Nile flood over that river-born oasis.

[Sidenote: Indirect political and moral effects.]

Plutarch states in his "Solon" that after the rebellion of Kylon in 612
B.C. the Athenian people were divided into as many political factions as
there were physical types of country in Attica. The mountaineers, who
were the poorest party, wanted something like a democracy; the people of
the plains, comprising the greatest number of rich families, were
clamorous for an oligarchy; the coast population of the south,
intermediate both in social position and wealth, wanted something
between the two. The same three-fold division appeared again in 564 B.C.
on the usurpation of Peisistratus.[27] Here the connection between
geographic condition and political opinion is clear enough, though the
links are agriculture and commerce. New England's opposition to the War
of 1812, culminating in the threat of secession of the Hartford
Convention, can be traced back through the active maritime trade to the
broken coastline and unproductive soil of that glaciated country.

In all democratic or representative forms of government permitting free
expression of popular opinion, history shows that division into