misleads.[67] Moreover, owing to the ceaseless movements of mankind,
these effects do not remain confined to the region that produced them,
but pass on with the wandering throng in whom they have once developed,
and in whom they endure or vanish according as they prove beneficial or
deleterious in the new habitat.

[Sidenote: Psychical effects.]

II. More varied and important are the psychical effects of geographic
environment. As direct effects they are doubtless bound up in many
physiological modifications; and as influences of climate, they help
differentiate peoples and races in point of temperament. They are
reflected in man's religion and his literature, in his modes of thought
and figures of speech. Blackstone states that "in the Isle of Man, to
take away a horse or ox was no felony, but a trespass, because of the
difficulty in that little territory to conceal them or to carry them
off; but to steal a pig or a fowl, which is easily done, was a capital
misdemeanour, and the offender punished with death." The judges or
deemsters in this island of fishermen swore to execute the laws as
impartially "as the herring's backbone doth lie in the middle of the
fish."[68] The whole mythology of the Polynesians is an echo of the
encompassing ocean. The cosmography of every primitive people, their
first crude effort in the science of the universe, bears the impress of
their habitat. The Eskimo's hell is a place of darkness, storm and
intense cold;[69] the Jew's is a place of eternal fire. Buddha, born in
the steaming Himalayan piedmont, fighting the lassitude induced by heat
and humidity, pictured his heaven as Nirvana, the cessation of all
activity and individual life.

[Sidenote: Indirect effect upon language]