we have like living things in the most dissimilar situations, and
unlike living things in the most similar ones. And though some of
Mr. Wallace's speculations on ethnology may be doubtful, no one
doubts that in the archipelago he has studied so well, as often
elsewhere in the world, though rarely with such marked emphasis, we
find like men in contrasted places, and unlike men in resembling
places. Climate is clearly not THE force which makes nations, for it
does not always make them, and they are often made without it.

The problem of 'nation-making'--that is, the explanation of the
origin of nations such as we now see them, and such as in historical
times they have always been--cannot, as it seems to me, be solved
without separating it into two: one, the making of broadly-marked
races, such as the negro, or the red man, or the European; and the
second, that of making the minor distinctions, such as the
distinction between Spartan and Athenian, or between Scotchman and
Englishman. Nations, as we see them, are (if my arguments prove
true) the produce of two great forces: one the race-making force
which, whatever it was, acted in antiquity, and has now wholly, or
almost, given over acting; and the other the nation-making force,
properly so called, which is acting now as much as it ever acted,
and creating as much as it ever created.

The strongest light on the great causes which have formed and are
forming nations is thrown by the smaller causes which are altering
nations. The way in which nations change, generation after
generation, is exceedingly curious, and the change occasionally
happens when it is very hard to account for. Something seems to
steal over society, say of the Regency time as compared with that of
the present Queen. If we read of life at Windsor (at the cottage now