地理的故事(插图·中文导读英文版)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：(美)房龙（Van Loon, H.W.）

出版社：清华大学出版社

格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT

地理的故事(插图·中文导读英文版)试读：

前言

亨德里克·威廉·房龙（Hendrik Willem Van Loon，1882—1944），荷兰裔美国人，20世纪美国著名的通俗历史学家、科普作家和文学家，在历史、文化、文明、科学等方面都有著作，被誉为“伟大的文化普及者，传播人类文明的文化骑士”。

1882年1月14日，房龙出生于荷兰鹿特丹。幼年时对历史、地理、船舶、绘画和音乐感兴趣，这种兴趣伴随着他的一生。从8岁起，房龙先后进入一些著名的寄宿制学校，学习了拉丁文、希腊文和英文。10岁时，房龙便立志要成为历史学家。1902年，房龙入美国康奈尔大学学习，获学士学位；之后，房龙进入德国慕尼黑大学学习，1911年获博士学位。房龙求学前后，当过编辑、记者、播音员，也先后在美国几所大学任教，游历过世界上很多地方。1913年，房龙编著并出版了第一本历史书《荷兰共和国的衰亡》，虽然销路一般，但受到了书评界的赞扬。1920年圣诞节期间，房龙出版了他的第二本书《古代的人》，这是一部带插图的通俗历史读本，市场反应良好。经过知识、阅历、研究成果等方面的积累，房龙于1921年出版了他的第三部历史著作《人类的故事》，并一举成名，从此房龙迎来了他创作的丰收期。之后，房龙陆续出版了《发明的故事》、《圣经的故事》、《美国简史》、《地理的故事》（《人类的家园》）、《人类的艺术》、《宽容》、《与世界伟人谈心》、《伦勃朗传》、《太平洋的故事》等二十多部著作。房龙作品的内容涉及历史、地理、宗教、文学、政治、艺术、科学和技术等诸多方面。房龙多才多艺，能用十种语言写作和与人交流，拉得一手优美的小提琴，还能画画，他的著作中的所有插图全部出自他自己手笔。1944年3月11日，房龙在美国康涅狄格州去世，美国《星期日快报》刊登讣告时用了这样的标题“历史成就了他的名声——房龙逝世”。

房龙的作品文笔优美、知识广博，在世界各地广受读者喜爱。其作品内容丰富、资料翔实、知识广博而不乏真知灼见，文字深入浅出、通俗优美、轻松风趣而又发人深省，贯穿着理性、宽容和进步的思想，具有经久不衰的魅力。他的绝大部分著作均是风靡世界的畅销书，历经近一个世纪仍不失魅力，影响了一代又一代的读者。房龙的作品饮誉世界，荷兰、德国、法国、瑞典、丹麦、芬兰、挪威、日本、印度、前苏联、西班牙、意大利、波兰、匈牙利、希腊等国都翻译出版了他的作品。

自20世纪20年代开始，房龙的主要作品几乎被同步介绍给中国的读者。翻译者把这个荷兰名字译为“房龙”。此后，这个名字为我国读者所熟悉，并流传下来。房龙作品深入浅出的通俗文风和百科全书般的渊博知识，对与之同时代的中国读者产生了巨大的影响。这是因为，一方面是房龙的文风正好适合于当时新文化运动所提倡的生活化的白话文，房龙的书也为中国求知者提供了关于人类和自然的启蒙知识；另一方面，房龙的写作技巧也给中国当时的作家以很多启发。据历史学家和著名报人曹聚仁回忆：20世纪20年代，他在候车时偶然买到《人类的故事》中译本，“那天下午，我发痴似的，车来了，在车上读，到了家中，把晚饭吞下去，就靠在床上读，一直读到天明，走马观花地总算看完了。这50年中，我总是看了又看，除了《儒林外史》、《红楼梦》，没有其他的书这么吸引我了”。郁达夫曾说：“房龙的笔，有一种魔力……是将文学家的手法，拿来用以讲述科学……无论大人小孩，读他书的人，都觉得娓娓忘倦了。”20世纪80年代是中国改革开放的年代，房龙的作品重新被发现，且被逐步引进。而自20世纪90年代后期开始，国内兴起“房龙热”，房龙的作品再次受到读者的青睐，这是因为他的著作特别符合现代中国人的心理：务实进取的时代，读书趋向于知识性、趣味性。

目前，国内已出版的房龙著作形式主要有两种：一种是中文翻译版，另一种是中英文对照版。其中的中英文对照读本比较受读者的欢迎，这主要是得益于中国人热衷于学习英文的大环境。从英文学习的角度来看，直接使用纯英文的学习资料更有利于英语学习。考虑到对英文内容背景的了解有助于英文阅读，使用中文导读应该是一种比较好的方式，也可以说是该类型书的第三种版本形式。采用中文导读而非中英文对照的方式进行编排，这样有利于国内读者摆脱对英文阅读依赖中文注释的习惯。基于以上原因，我们决定编译房龙系列著作中的经典，其中包括《人类的故事》、《圣经的故事》、《地理的故事》、《宽容》和《美国简史》，并采用中文导读英文版的形式出版。同时，为了读者更好地理解书中内容，在部分章节中加入了插图或照片，在中文导读中，我们尽力使其贴近原作的精髓，也尽可能保留原作的风格。我们希望能够编出为当代中国读者所喜爱的经典读本。读者在阅读英文故事之前，可以先阅读中文导读内容，这样有利于了解故事背景，从而加快阅读速度。我们相信，这些经典著作的引进对加强当代中国读者，特别是青少年读者的科学素养和人文修养是非常有帮助的。

房龙始终站在全人类的高度在写作，他摒弃了深奥理论，却拥有自己独立的思想和体系，他的论述主要是围绕人类生存与发展等本质的问题，贯穿其中的精神是科学、宽容和进步，他的目标是向人类的无知与偏执挑战，他采取的方式是普及知识和真理，使它们成为人所皆知的常识。房龙毕生持人文主义立场，在有的问题上不免有与唯物主义者不同的观点；同时，由于他是生活在20世纪早期的美国作家，其思想的观点不可避免地会受到时代和历史的局限，比如在他的《地理的故事》一书中错误地将西藏放到“中亚高地”这一章，而不是“中国”这一章来讲述，又比如他以地理环境决定论来解释日本近代侵略行为，希望读者朋友阅读这些著作时能够甄别。

本书主要内容由王勋、纪飞编译。参加本书故事素材搜集整理及编译工作的还有郑佳、刘乃亚、赵雪、左新杲、黄福成、冯洁、徐鑫、马启龙、王业伟、王旭敏、陈楠、王多多、邵舒丽、周丽萍、王晓旭、李永振、孟宪行、熊红华、胡国平、熊建国、徐平国、王小红等。限于我们的科学、人文素养和英语水平，书中难免会有不当之处，衷心希望读者朋友批评指正。前面的话

地理是什么？之前我们所学的地理只是名词，缺乏联系。本书将要着重描述那些真正有趣的国家，他们为什么会在那里，从哪里来，现在正在做什么，而不会对那些只意味着一些名字的国家给予过多关注，这样才能使我们更好地记住它们。Foreword

Ten years ago you sent me a letter and today you get your answer. What you wrote（I am quoting from the original）was this：

“……Yes, but how about geography？No, I don't merely want a new geography. I want a geography of my own, a geography that shall tell me what I want to know and omit everything else and I want you to write it for me.I went to a school where they took the subject very seriously.I learned all about the different countries and how they were bounded and about the cities and how many inhabitants they had and I learned the names of all the mountains and how high they were and how much coal was exported every year, and I forgot all these things just as fast as I had learned them.They failed to connect.They resolved themselves into a jumble of badly digested recollections, like a museum too full of pictures or a concert that has lasted too long.And they were of no earthly value to me, for every time I needed some concrete fact, I had to look it up on maps and in atlases and encyclopedias and blue books.I suppose that many others have suffered in the same way.On behalf of all these poor victims, will you please give us a new geography that will be of some use？Put all the mountains and the cities and the oceans on your maps and then tell us＆nbsp；only about the people who live in those, places and why they are there and where they came from and what they are doing——a sort of human interest story applied to geography.And please stress the countries that are really interesting and don't pay quite so much attention to the others that are merely names, for then we will be able to remember all about them, but otherwise……”

And I, eager as always to oblige when I receive a command from your hands, turn around and say，“My dear, here it is！”HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON阅读本书之前，告诉你如何使用这本书

本书是为一般读者对自己生活环境有一些了解所著。最好且最方便的学习地理方法是用图片。我已经根据自己的地理构想绘出了一些样品，包括一些平面地图和三维地图。建议读者根据自己对于事情将被如何处理的主意画出你自己的地图。JUST A MOMENT BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER WHILE I TELL YOU HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book should be read with an atlas. There are a large number of excellent atlases and almost any one will do.For atlases are like dictionaries.Even a bad one is better than none at all.

As you will soon discover, there are quite a number of maps in this volume but these are not meant as a substitute for a regular atlas. I drew them merely to show you the many ways of approach to the subject under discussion and（if I must tell the truth）to get you personally interested in drawing maps according to your own notion of the geographical right and wrong.You see, flat maps, however ingeniously conceived, must be somewhat out of gear.The only approximately correct maps are those pasted on globes but even our globes are not entirely above suspicion for they should really be spheroids.We make them spheres merely for the sake of convenience.The earth, of course, is slightly flattened near the poles but it would take a gigantic globe to show the difference, and so we need not worry about that minor irregularity.Get yourself a globe（I wrote this book with the help of a ten-cent-store globe which wasreally a pencil-sharpener）and use it to your heart's content, but remember that it is an“approximation”and not an“established fact”.The“established facts”will only enter into your life if you should try to qualify for a master mariner's certificate.But in that case, you would have to spend many years mastering an exceedingly difficult branch of science；and this book was not written for specialists but for the average reader who wants to get some general ideas about the planet upon which he happens to live.

Now let me tell you one thing. The best and most convenient way to learn geography is to revaluate everything into pictures.

Don't copy me or anybody else. Look at my pictures if you care to do so, but regard them merely as a sort of geographical appetizer, as polite suggestions for the meal you intend'to prepare yourself by and by.

I have tried to give you quite a number of samples according to the geographical notions of the author himself. I have drawn you two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional maps.It will take you some time to get accustomed to these three-dimensional contraptions but, once you see them, you will no longer like the two-dimensional variety.I have given you maps as seen from mountain tops and according to the different angles from which you are able to contemplate a landscape.And I have given you maps as seen from aeroplanes and Zeppelins and the sort of maps we might expect to see if the oceans should run dry.I have given you a few maps which are merely pretty and ornamental and others which resemble geometrical patterns.Take your choice and then draw your own maps according to your own notions of how the thing should be done.

Draw maps……Get yourself a small. globe or a large globe and an atlas.Buy yourself a pencil and a pad of paper and then draw your own pictures.

For there is only one way in which you can learn geography so that you will never forget it——draw pictures.1.我们生活的世界还生活着其他人/And These Are the People Who Live in the World We Live in导读

假设每个人都高6英尺（译者注：1英尺=0.3048米），宽1.5英尺，厚1英尺，就可以将全人类装在边长为半英里那么大的盒子里。把盒子推入亚利桑那州的大峡谷，人类将被埋葬在那里。远方的天文学家不会注意到这些，一个世纪后，只有那里周围的山和植物见证着人类被埋葬的所在地。

我们只不过是一小撮脆弱而没有什么防范能力的哺乳动物。从人类诞生那天起，我们便被大群的生物团团包围，它们天生有比我们更强壮的生理条件。

当我们笨拙地用两腿，而不像厚皮动物那样借助树干行走时，是那些陆地和水域的动物而不是我们主宰着世界。而现在，它们中的许多或是在自然历史博物馆中，或是被人类圈养，大部分则回到丛林，不再称霸世界。

人类凭借自己理性的头脑成为世界的统治者，而人类中理性和独立思考能力更强的一小部分人成为人类的统治者。

地球被具有不同智力和思考能力的人类划分，人类借助自己发达的大脑为自己夺取财富，但是底线是不能超越自然的法则，她要求我们研究并顺从她的命令。过犹不及。

人类对于“创造大法则”，即同类之间应该和平友爱的公然违背会使人类陷入灭绝的困地。其他的物种正在高度警惕，毕竟被它们统治时总是比现在充斥着战舰和武器的世界有更多优点。装在盒子里的人类

本书希望能给读者以启示，指出问题所在。我们都有责任维护我们的世界的安宁。

IT sounds incredible, but nevertheless it is true. If everybody in this world of ours were six feet tall and a foot and a half wide and a foot thick（and that is making people a little bigger than they usually are），then the whole of the human race（and according to the latest available statistics there are now nearly 2，000，000，000 descendants of the original Homo Sapiens and his wife）could be packed into a box measuring half a mile in each direction.That, as I just said, sounds incredible, but if you don't believe me, figure it out for yourself and you will find it to be correct.

If we transported that box to the Grand Canyon of Arizona and balanced it neatly on the low stone wall that keeps people from breaking their necks when stunned by the incredible beauty of that silent witness of the forces of Eternity, and then called little Noodle, the dachshund, and told him（the tiny beast is very intelligent and loves to oblige）to give the unwieldy contraption a slight push with his soft brown nose, there would be a moment of crunching and ripping as the wooden planks loosened stones and shrubs and trees on their downward path, and then a low and even softer bumpity-bumpity-bump and a sudden splash when the outer edges struck the banks of the Colorado River.

Then silence and oblivion！

The astronomers on distant and nearby planets would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

A century from now, a little mound, densely covered with vegetable matter, would perhaps indicate where humanity lay buried.

And that would be all.

I can well imagine that some of my readers will not quite like this story and will feel rather uncomfortable when they see their own proud race reduced to such proportions of sublime insignificance.

There is however a different angle to the problem—an angle which makes the very smallness of our numbers and the helplessness of our puny little bodies a matter of profound and sincere pride.

Here we are, a mere handful of weak and defenceless mammals. Ever since the dawn of the first day we have been surrounded on all sides by hordes and swarms of creatures infinitely better prepared for the struggle of existence than we are ourselves.Some of them were a hundred feet long and weighed as much as a small locomotive while others had teeth as sharp as the blade of a circular saw.Many varieties went about their daily affairs clad in the armor of a medieval knight.Others were invisible to the human eye but they multiplied at such a terrific rate that they would have owned the entire earth in less than a year's time if it had not been for certain enemies who were able to destroy them almost as fast as they were born.Whereas man could only exist under the most favorable circumstances and was forced to look for a habitat among the few small pieces of dry land situated between the high mountains and the deep sea, these fellow-passengers of ours considered no summit too high and found no sea too deep for their ambitions.They were apparently made of the stuff that could survive regardless of its natural surroundings.

When we learn on eminent authority that certain varieties of insects are able to disport themselves merrily in petroleum（a substance we would hardly fancy as the main part of our daily diet）and that others manage to live through such changes in temperature as would kill all of us within a very few minutes；when we discover to our gruesome dismay that those little brown beetles, who seem so fond of literature that they are forever racing around in our bookcases, continue the even tenor of their restless days minus two or three or four legs, while we ourselves are disabled by a mere pin-prick on one of our toes, then we sometimes begin to realize against what sort of competitors we have been forced to hold our own, ever since we made our first appearance upon this whirling bit of rock, lost somewhere in the darkest outskirts of an indifferent universe.

What a side splitting joke we must have been to our pachydermous contemporaries who stood by and watched this pinkish sport of nature indulge in its first clumsy efforts to walk on its hind legs without the help of a convenient tree-trunk or cane！平静的王国（油画爱德华·希克斯）

But what has become of those proud and exclusive owners of almost 200，000，000 square miles of land and water（not to mention the unfathomable oceans of air）who ruled so sublime by that right of eminent domain which was based upon brute force and sly cunning？

The greater part of them has disappeared from view except where as“Exhibit A”or“B”we have kindly given them a little parking space in one of our museums devoted to natural history. Others, in order to remain among those present, were forced to go into domestic service and today in exchange for a mere livelihood they favor us with their hides and their eggs and their milk and the beef that grows upon their flanks, or drag such loads as we consider a little too heavy for our own lazy efforts.Many more have betaken themselves to out-of-the-way places where we permit them to browse and graze and perpetuate their species because, thus far, we have not thought it worth our while to remove them from the scene and claim their territory for ourselves.

In short, during only a couple of thousands of centuries（a mere second from the point of view of eternity），the human race has made itself the undisputed ruler of every bit of land and at present it bids fair to add both air and sea as part of its domains. And all that, if you please, has been accomplished by a few hundred million creatures who enjoyed not one single advantage over their enemies except the divine gift of Reason.

Even there I am exaggerating. The gift of Reason in its more sublime form and the ability to think for one's self is restricted to a mere handful of men and women.They therefore become the masters who lead.The others, no matter how much they may resent the fact, can only follow.The result is a strange and halting procession, for no matter how hard people may try, there are ten thousand stragglers for every true pioneer.

Whither the route of march will eventually lead us, that we do not know. But in the light of what has been achieved during the last four thousand years, there is no limit to the total sum of our potential achievements—unless we are tempted away from the path of normal development by our strange inherent cruelty which makes us treat other members of our own species as we would never have dared to treat a cow or a dog or even a tree.

The earth and the fullness thereof has been placed at the disposal of Man. Where it has not been placed at his disposal, he has taken possession by right of his superior brain and by the strength of his foresight and his shot-guns.

This home of ours is a good home. It grows food enough for all of us.It has abundant quarries and clay beds and forests from which all of us can be provided with more than ample shelter.The patient sheep of our pastures and the waving flax fields with their myriads of blue flowers, not to forget the industrious little silk-worm of China's mulberry trees—they all contribute to shelter our bodies against the cold of winter and protect them against the scorching heat of summer.This home of ours is a good home.It produces all these benefits in so abundant measure that every man, woman and child could have his or her share with a little extra supply thrown in for the inevitable days of rest.

But Nature has her own code of laws. They are just, these laws, but they are inexorable and there is no court of appeal.

Nature will give unto us and she will give without stint, but in return she demands that we study her precepts and abide by her dictates.

A hundred cows in a meadow meant for only fifty spells disaster—a bit of wisdom with which every farmer is thoroughly familiar. A million people gathered in one spot where there should be only a hundred thousand causes congestion, poverty and unnecessary suffering, a fact which apparently has been overlooked by those who are supposed to guide our destinies.

That, however, is not the most serious of our manifold errors. There is another way in which we offend our generous foster-mother.Man in the only living organism that is hostile to its own kind.Dog does not eat dog—tiger does not eat tiger—yea, even the loathsome hyena lives at peace with the members of his own species.But Man hates Man, Man kills Man, and in the world of today the prime concern of every nation is to prepare itself for the coming slaughter of some more of its neighbors.这就是我们生活的地球

This open violation of Article I of the great Code of Creation which insists upon peace and good will among the members of the same species has carried us to a point where soon the human race may be faced with the possibility of complete annihilation. For our enemies are ever on the alert.If Homo Sapiens（the all-too-flattering name given to our race by a cynical scientist, to denote our intellectual superiority over the rest of the animal world）—if Homo Sapiens is unable or unwilling to assert himself as the master of all he surveys, there are thousands of other candidates for the job and it often seems as if a world dominated by cats or dogs or elephants or some of the more highly organized insects（and how they watch their opportunity！）might offer very decided advantages over a planet top-heavy with battle-ships and siege-guns.

What is the answer and what is the way out of this hideous and shameful state of affairs？

In a humble way this little book hopes to point to the one and only way out of that lugubrious and disastrous blind-alley into which we have strayed through the clumsy ignorance of our ancestors.

It will take time, it will take hundreds of years of slow and painful education to make us find the true road of salvation. But that road leads towards the consciousness that we are all of us fellow-passengers on one and the same planet.Once we have got hold of this absolute verity—once we have realized and grasped the fact that for better or for worse this is our common home—that we have never known another place of abode—that we shall never be able to move from the spot in space upon which we happened to be born—that it therefore behooves us to behave as we would if we found ourselves on board a train or a steamer bound for an unknown destination—we shall have taken the first but most important step towards the solution of that terrible problem which is at the root of all our difficulties.

We are all of us fellow-passengers on the same planet and the weal and woe of everybody else means the weal and woe of ourselves！长着朱鹭头的托特神（雕刻　埃及）

Call me a dreamer and call me a fool-call me a visionary or call for the police or the ambulance to remove me to a spot where I can no longer proclaim such unwelcome heresies. But mark my words and remember them on that fatal day when the human race shall be requested to pack up its little toys and surrender the keys of happiness to a more worthy successor.

The only hope for survival lies in that one sentence：

We are all of us fellow-passengers on the same planet and we are all of us equally responsible for the happiness and well being of the world in which we happen to live.2.“地理”一词的定义以及我将在本书中如何使用它/A Definition of the Word Geography and How I Shall Apply It in the Present Volume导读

地理是有关地球、自然和区域气候等的科学，我在这里会着重强调人在其中所起到的重要作用。因此，我所讨论的不仅仅是地理，还包括政治。

各种各样的人的出现促进了不同经济、社会和文化的发生。我们在这里宽容那些令人不悦的习性和性格。自然地理，比如一座山如果没有人类活动的参与仅仅只是一座山而已。因此，人是本书中最为强调的。

BEFORE we start out upon a voyage, we usually try to find out more or less definitely whither we are bound and how we are supposed to get there. The reader who opens a book is entitled to a little information of the same sort and a short definition of the word“Geography”will therefore not be out of order.

I happen to have the“Concise Oxford Dictionary”on my desk and thatwill do as well as any other. The word I am looking for appears at the bottom of page 344，edition of 1912.

“Geography：the science of the earth's surface, form, physical features, natural and political divisions, climate, productions and population.”

I could not possibly hope to do better, but I shall stress some of the aspects of the case at the expense of others, because I intend to place man in the center of the stage. This book of mine will not merely discuss the surface of the earth and its physical features, together with its political and natural boundaries.I would rather call it a study of man in search of food and shelter and leisure for himself and for his family and an attempt to find out the way in which man has either adapted himself to his background or has reshaped his physical surroundings in order to be as comfortable and well nourished and happy as seemed compatible with his own limited strength.

It has been truly said that the Lord has some very strange customers among those who love Him, and indeed we shall find our planet inhabited by a weird and extraordinary variety of fellow-boarders. Many of them, upon first acquaintance, will appear to be possessed of very objectionable personal habits and of general characteristics which we would rather not encounter in our own children.But two billion human beings, even if they do not cut much of a figure when packed in a small wooden box, are still a very respectable number of people and among so many there is of course the widest possible scope for all sorts of experiments of an economic and social and cultural nature.It seems to me that those experiments deserve our attention before anything else.For a mountain is after all merely a mountain until it has been seen by human eyes and has been trod by human feet and until its slopes and valleys have been occupied and fought over and cultivated by a dozen generations of hungry settlers.

The Atlantic Ocean was just as wide and deep and as wet and salty before the beginning of the thirteenth century as after, but it took the human touch to make it what it is today—a bridge between the New World and the Old, the highway for the commerce between East and West.

For thousands of years the endless Russian plains lay ready to offer their abundant harvests to whomsoever should take the trouble to sow the first grain. But the aspect of that country today would be a very different one if the hand of a German or a Frank, rather than that of a Slav, had guided the iron-pointed stick that plowed the first furrows.

The islands of Nippon would shake and quake just as incessantly, whether they happened to be inhabited by aboriginal Japanese or by the remnants of the now defunct Tasmanian race, but in the latter case they would hardly be able to feed 60，000，000 people. While the British Isles, if they had been overrun by Neapolitans or Berbers instead of having been conquered by the restless fighters from northern Europe, would never have become the center of an empire one hundred and fifty times as large as the mother country and containing one-sixth of all the human beings now assembled on our planet.

Generally speaking, I have paid more attention to the purely“human”side of geography than to the commercial problems which are held to be of such great importance in a day and age devoted to mass production.

But experience has taught me that no matter how eloquent you wax upon the subject of importing and exporting, and the output of coal mines and oil reservoirs and bank deposits, you will never be able to tell your reader something which he can remember from one page to the next. Whenever he has need of such figures he will be obliged to look them up once more and verify them with the help of a dozen contradictory（and often self-contradictory）handbooks on commercial statistics.

Man comes first in this geography.

His physical environment and background come next.

The rest is given whatever space remains.3.我们的行星：它的习性、风俗以及举止/Our Planet：Its Habits, Customs and Manners导读

地球是太阳的一颗行星，围绕太阳公转，吸收太阳的光和热，是一个椭球体，也可近似为地极略扁的球体。椭圆体短轴，即地轴，只比长轴短1/300。

很久之前，人类都认为地球是宇宙的中心，像平盘子那样。之后天文学家告诉我们地球是圆的，并以一定的速度围绕太阳飞行。4世纪之后，基督教会权倾一时，否认了天文学家的说法，坚持说地球是宇宙的中心。只是到了15世纪末，有非常确凿的证据支持天文学家的说法，才没有办法再否认。

光速为每秒18.6万英里（译者注：1英里=1609.344米），故光年为365×24×60×60×18.6万英里。借助于光来观察世界的望远镜虽比伽利略时代有了很大的发展，但仍有缺陷。我们只能看到宇宙的一小部分，对于其他那些不能被光感应的部分我们一无所知。

太阳和月亮无时无刻不影响着我们的生活，太阳提供光和热，月亮引起“潮汐”。春汛的破坏力等同于洪水泛滥，它发生在太阳和月亮同时位于地球同一侧时，这时地球所受的“拖”力最强。

地球被一层氮气和氧气所包围，这个气层据猜测约有300英里厚。大气层与地表和海洋相互作用，形成各种各样的气候。最重要的三个因素是泥土的温度、盛行的风和空气中的水分。这里，气候是指一年中不同时间里的天气状况。太阳系八大行星

其中，风是空气在两地之间形成的潮流。热空气向上，使得原地暂时成真空。冷空气就乘虚而入占据这一真空。水分能够储存热量，因此，濒海国家会比内陆国家更温暖。

在热带地区，同等宽度的地表光线比在极地地区入射方向更垂直，阳光会将其全部的能量奉献给所投射的地表。而斜射在宽度两倍地表的同等宽度的光的贡献将会减半。

太阳光使地表先加热，地表通过大气层传递热量，使得不同高度的大气层的温度不同，地势越高大气层的温度越低。空气有重量，它越靠近地面，地面所承受的压力越大。压力随着高度持续变化。物理学家和地理学家猜想大气压与风的方向有联系。现在我们知道比海平面压力高的叫高压地带，低的叫低压地带，而风总是倾向于从高压地带吹向低压地带。

雨来自有水的地方，比如海洋、内陆海和雪域。热空气比冷空气含有更多的水蒸气，当空气逐渐变冷，水蒸气凝结起来以雨水、冰雹或雪的方式降落到地球表面。从这方面看，风决定了特定地区降雨量的多少。因此向风区域多雨和雪，背风区域则干燥。

我们把地球缩小为一个直径3英尺的球体，那么最高的山峰也只是一张纸片那么薄，海洋最深处就像一张邮票的厚度。火山往往被用来寻求行星的内部特征，但我认为应把它比作皮肤上的脓肿，它只是地区性事件，不能代表更深处地球的活动。

地球有320座活火山，另外400座处于休眠或养老状态。大多数火山坐落在海岸，我们至今不知道火山爆发的原因。球体收缩，表面会发生褶皱，正如地球表面那样。我们猜想自从地球作为一个独立的行星以来，地球的直径便已经缩短了大约30英里，其中地球任何一次变化对我们都是一场灾难。

造物者用精确的平衡缓慢地制造着这个世界的奇迹，沧海变桑田。人类的指手画脚只会让她不能适应。人类的贪欲和粗暴正将自己推向危险的境地。我们不能容忍对生存环境如此破坏。

海洋是我们无法控制的地方。海洋的面积占地球表面的3/4，深度从2英尺到3.5万英尺。水层分为三个主要部分：太平洋、大西洋和印度洋。此外，还有内陆海，河流和湖泊。海洋是地球的液体外套，由于风的作用，海水无时无刻不处于运动中，形成漂流。如果风向固定，即成为洋流。洋流使得人类的居住地不会太过寒冷，因此它在人类历史发展中功不可没。比如那有名的湾流为墨西哥提供热源，使英国、爱尔兰和所有北海国家肥沃多产。哥白尼的宇宙体系

本章介绍了一些背景，关于气象学、海洋学和天文学。

LET us begin with an old and trusted definition.“The world is a small, dark object, entirely surrounded by space.”

It is not a“sphere”or a ball but a“spheroid”，which means first cousin to a sphere and consists of a ball slightly flattened at the poles. The so-called“poles”you can find for yourself by sticking a knitting needle through the center of an apple or an orange and holding the object straight in front of you.Where the knitting needle sticks out of the apple or the orange, there the poles are located, one in the middle of a deep sea（the North Pole）and the other on top of a high mountain plateau.

As for the“flatness”of the polar regions, which goes with the definition of a spheroid, it need not disturb you in the least. For the axis of the earth from pole to pole is only 1/300 shorter than the diameter taken at the equator.In other words, if you were the proud possessor of a globe of three feet in diameter（and few globes that you can buy in our stores are as large as that—you would have to go to a museum to find one），the axis would be only 1/8 of an inch shorter than the equatorial diameter, and it would hardly show unless the workmanship had been of exceptional fineness.

Nevertheless the fact is of considerable interest to explorers who are trying to find their way through the polar regions and to those who make a study of the higher forms of geography. But for the purposes of the present book it is sufficient that I have mentioned it.Your physics professor has probably one of those little contraptions in his laboratory that will show you how the poles could not help becoming flat as soon as our speck of dust began to revolvearound its own axis.Ask him to let you see it.That will save you a trip to the home of all the meridians.

The earth, as we all know, is a planet. We have inherited the word from the Greeks who had observed（or thought they had observed）that certain stars were forever moving across the skies while others apparently stood still.They therefore called the former“planets”or“wanderers”and the latter“fixed stars”because, having no telescopes, they could not follow them on their peregrinations.As for the word“star”，we do not know its origin but it probably has something to do with a Sanskrit root which was in turn connected with the verb“to strew”.If that be true the stars would then be the little flames“strewn”all over the heavens, a description which is quite pretty and fits the case admirably.

The earth turns around the sun and depends upon the sun for its light and heat. As the sun is more than seven hundred times as large as all the planets put together, and as the temperature of the sun near the surface is about 6000°F, the earth need not feel apologetic about borrowing her humble little portion of comfort from a neighbor who can so easily spare these few charitable rays and will never know the difference.

In the olden days the people believed that the earth was situated in the center of the universe, a small, flat disc of dry land entirely surrounded by the waters of the ocean and suspended in the air like the coffin of Mohammed or a toy balloon that has escaped the hand of a child. A few of the more enlightened Greek astronomers and mathematicians（the first people who dared to think for themselves without asking the permission of their priests）seem to have had a very definite suspicion that this theory must be wrong.After several centuries of very hard and very straight thinking, they came to the conclusion that the earth was not flat, but round, and that it did not hang quietly suspended in the air and in the exact center of the universe, but that it floated through space and was flying at a considerable rate of speed round a much larger object which was called the sun.

At the same time they suggested that those other shining little orbs whichseemed to revolve around us against a common background of so-called“fixed stars”were merely our fellow-planets, children of the same mother-sun and subject to the identical laws of behavior which regulated our own daily conduct—such as getting up and going to bed at certain regular hours, and being obliged to follow a track which had been laid out for us at the day of our birth and from which we could not stray without running the risk of instant doom.

During the last two hundred years of the Roman Empire the thinking part of the population had accepted this hypothesis as something so self-evident that it could no longer be considered a subject for debate. But when the Church became all-powerful, shortly after the beginning of the fourth century, it was no longer safe to harbor such ideas, least of all that one which proclaimed the earth to be round.We should not judge them too harshly.In the first place the earliest converts to Christianity generally belonged to those classes of society that had been the least exposed to the current learning of the times.And furthermore they were firmly convinced that the end of the world was near at hand when Christ would return to the former scene of His sufferings to separate the good from the evil.He would return in the midst of all His glory and for every one to behold.But, so they reasoned, and quite correctly from their own point of view, if this were to be the case（and they had no doubt upon the subject）then the world must be flat.For otherwise Christ would have to make His reappearance twice—once for the benefit of the people on the western hemisphere and once for the benefit of those on the other side of the world.Such a procedure, of course, would be absurd and undignified and therefore entirely out of the question.

The church, therefore, for almost a thousand years insisted upon teaching once again that the earth was a flat disc and that it was the center of the universe. In learned circles, among the scientists of a few of the monasteries and among the astronomers of some of the rapidly growing cities, the old Greek conception of a round world, revolving around the sun together with a number of other planets, was never quite discarded.Only the men who held this to be true did not openly dare to talk about the subject, but kept their ideas strictly to themselves.For they knew that a public discussion would merely upset the peace and quiet of millions of their less intelligent fellow-citizens while it would do absolutely nothing to bring the solution of the problem any nearer.伽利略的望远镜

Since then, the Church people too, with very few exceptions, have been forced to accept the notion that the planet on which we live must be a ball. By the end of the fifteenth century the evidence in favor of this ancient Greek theory had become too overwhelming to be refuted any longer.And it was and is based upon the following observations：

In the first place, there was the fact that when we approach a mountain or a ship at sea, we first of all notice the summit or the top of the mast and only very gradually, as we come nearer, are we able to see the rest of the object under observation.

In the second place, no matter where we are, the scene all around us appears to be a circle. Our eyes therefore must be equally removed from every part of the land or sea under observation and the further we get away from the surface of the earth in a balloon or on top of a tower, the larger that circle gets.If the earth happened to be egg-shaped, we would find ourselves in the middle of a large oval.If it were a square or a triangle, the horizon would be a square or a triangle too.

In the third place, when a partial eclipse of the moon takes place, the shadow of the earth on the moon is a circle and only a ball will cause a circular shadow.

In the fourth place, the other planets and stars too are spheres and why should we alone among so many billions be an exception？

In the fifth place, when the ships of Magellan had sailed long enough in a westerly direction, they finally returned to the place from which they had left and when Captain Cook did the same thing, going from west to east, the survivors of his expedition also came back to the port from which they had sailed.

And finally, when we travel northward towards the poles, the familiarconstellations of the stars（the signs of the Zodiac of the ancients）disappear lower and lower below the horizon, but they arise again and come higher and higher, the nearer we return to the equator.

I hope that I have brought forward enough undisputable facts to prove that the planet on which we happen to live must be round. But should the evidence be insufficient to satisfy you, go to any reliable professor of physics.He will take one of those stones that are forever falling from high towers and he will let it do tricks with the law of gravity which prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the earth must be a sphere.If he uses very simple words and does not talk too fast, you may be able to understand him, but only if you know a great deal more about mathematics and physics than I do.

Here I could indulge in a great many very learned statistics, none of which however would be of the slightest use to you. The average mind（the author's mind included）is simply not fit to follow such calculations with any degree of comfort.Take light for example.Light travels at the rate of speed of 186，000 miles per second.It goes seven times around the earth while you snap your fingers once.And yet the light from the nearest of the fixed stars（Alpha Centauri, if you want the correct address）must travel four and one-third years at the rate of 186，000 miles per second ere it strikes our eyes.The sun can reach us in eight minutes and Jupiter in three minutes, but the Polar Star, which plays such an important role in the science of navigation, would need forty years to send us a single ray of light.

Alas, most of us get slightly dizzy when we are asked to“imagine”such a distance, and the very idea of a light-year, or the distance covered by a ray of light in a single year, or 365246060186，000 miles becomes something so enormous that as a rule we say“Oh, yes”，and then go out and play with the cat or turn on the radio.

But all of us are familiar with railroad trains. Let us try it that way：

An ordinary passenger train, going day and night without stops, would need five-sevenths of a year to reach the moon. But if it started today it would not get to the sun until A.D.2232.It would need 8，300 years to get to thesuburbs where the planet Neptune lives.All that however would be mere child's play compared to a trip to the nearest of the fixed stars, for that would mean a voyage of 75，000，000 years.As for the Polar Star, that train would need 700，000，000 years to get there and 700，000，000 years is a long time, a very long time.If we put the duration of life for the average human being at about seventy years（which is a very flattering estimate），10，000，000 generations of human beings would have been born and would have died ere that train got to its final destination.

And now we are only talking about the visible part of the universe. Our telescopes are a great deal better than the funny little contraptions with which the contemporaries of Galileo searched the sky and incidentally made some of the most remarkable discoveries.Even so, they are still very imperfect and until we improve our lenses a thousand-fold we shall not make much headway.Therefore, when we talk about the universe, what we really mean is“that small part of the universe which is visible and which has come under our own personal observation or under the observation of those sensitive photographic plates which are substituted nowadays for the human eye”.As for the rest of the universe, the still invisible part, alas, we know nothing about it.And what is worse, we dare not even guess.

Among all these millions of stars, fixed and otherwise, which are our more immediate neighbors, there are only two which influence our own existence in a very direct and noticeable fashion, and those two are the sun and the moon. The sun, because once every twenty-four hours she provides one-half of our planet with heat and light.And the moon, because she is near enough to us to influence the behavior of the ocean and to cause that strange aquatic phenomenon which we know as the“tides”.

The moon is really quite near to us. Therefore, although it is much smaller than the sun（if we represent the sun by our familiar out-sized globe of three feet diameter, the earth would be a green pea and the moon the mere point of a pin），the moon has a much stronger“pull”on the surface of the earth than the sun.

If the earth consisted entirely of solid matter, that pull of the moon would hardly make itself felt. But three-fourths of the surface of the earth consists of water and that water follows the moon on its peregrination across the earth, just as iron filings spread out across a piece of paper will follow the toy magnet you pass across the table.

All day and all night long a broad strip of water, several hundred miles wide, is following in the wake of the moonlight. When it enters bays and harbors and the mouths of rivers and becomes greatly condensed, it causes the tides of twenty or thirty or forty feet difference which make navigation in those waters such a very difficult feat.When the sun and the moon happen to be on the same side of the earth, the pull is of course much stronger than when the moon is there alone, and then we get a so-called“spring-tide”；and a spring-tide in many parts of the world is something very much akin to a small inundation.

The earth is entirely surrounded by a layer of nitrogen and oxygen which we call the atmosphere or the“air”. This layer is supposed to be about 300 miles thick and it turns around together with the earth just as the skin of an orange turns around with the inside of the orange which it protects.

Only a year or so ago a Swiss professor in a specially designed balloon went ten miles up in the air, into that part of the atmosphere which had never been visited before. That was quite a feat, but 290 miles still remain to be explored.

The atmosphere, together with the surface of the earth and the sea, is the laboratory in which all our different sorts of weather, our winds and our rainstorms and blizzards and our dry periods, are manufactured. As these influence our happiness and well-being every hour of our lives, we ought to discuss them here in considerable detail.

The three factors which make our climate what it is are the temperature of the soil, the prevailing wind and the amount of moisture which is present in the air. Originally“climate”meant the“slope of the earth”.For the Greeks had noticed that as the surface of the earth“sloped”further and further towards thepoles, both the temperature and the humidity of the spots they visited also changed, and in that way“climate”came to mean the atmospheric condition of any given region rather than its exact geographic position.

Today when we speak of the“climate”of a country, we mean the average weather conditions which prevail there during the different parts of the year and it is in that sense that I shall use the word.

First of all let me say something about those mysterious winds which have played such a great role in the civilization of mankind. For without the regular“trade-winds”of the equatorial ocean, the discovery of America might have been deferred until the age of the steamboat.Without the dew-laden breezes.California and the countries of the Mediterranean would never have reached that degree of prosperity which sets them apart from their neighbors in the north and in the east.Not to mention the particles of rock and sand which, swept forward by the wind, will act as gigantic, invisible sheets of sand-paper, and which after millions of years will grind even the most powerful mountain ranges from the face of the earth.

This word“wind”means literally something that“winds its way”. A wind, therefore, is a current of air“winding its way”from one place to another.But why does a current of air wind its way from one place to another？Because some of the air is usually warmer than the rest and therefore lighter and has a tendency to rise as high as it can go.When that happens, there is a vacuum.The cold air, being heavier, rushes into that vacuum, because, as the Greeks had already discovered two thousand years ago，“Nature abhors a vacuum”，and air is just as much of a vacuum-hater as water or the human race.

We know of course how we can produce hot air in any given room—by the simple expedient of lighting a fire. Among the planets the sun is the stove and the planets are the rooms which are to be heated.The greatest amount of heat will of course be nearest to the stove（along the equator）and the smallest amount of heat will be found furthest removed from the stove（near the North and South Poles）.

Now a stove causes a considerable commotion in the air—a circularcommotion. The hot air will rise towards the ceiling.As soon as it gets there, it will be further removed from the original source of heat than it was before, and as a result it will begin to cool off.The cooling process will cause it to lose its lightness and to fall back towards the earth.But as soon as it gets a little lower, it will once more get in touch with the stove.Once more it will grow warmer and lighter and once more it will begin to rise.And so on and so forth, until the stove goes out.But then the walls of the room, which have absorbed considerable heat while the stove was burning, will keep the room warm for a shorter or longer time, depending upon the material of which they are made.

These walls may be compared to the soil on which we happen to five. Sand and rocks absorb heat quicker than a rain-soaked marsh, but by the same token they let go of it with much greater ease.As a result, the desert is uncomfortably cold a short time after the setting of the sun, while a forest remains warm and comfortable for hours after the entrance of darkness.

Water is a veritable reservoir for the storing up of heat. As a result all countries situated on or near the ocean enjoy a much more even temperature than those located in the heart of a continent.

Since our stove, the sun, burns much longer and more fiercely in summer than in winter, it follows that the summer must be warmer than the winter. But there is something else that influences the action of the sun.If you have ever tried to make the bathroom a little less shivery on an extra cold day with a small electric heater, you will know that much depends upon the angle at which that little stove is placed.The same holds true for the sun.In the tropics, the rays of the sun hit the surface of the earth much more directly than near the poles.A ray of sunlight, therefore, a hundred miles wide, landing fairly and squarely upon a hundred miles of African forest or South American wilderness, will be able to devote its entire strength to these hundred miles of territory and to nothing else.But near the poles, a ray of sunlight a hundred miles wide will cover a stretch of land or ice that is twice as wide（as the picture will show you much more easily than a thousand words could hope to do），and the heating power of those hundred miles of sunlight near the poles will therefore be cutexactly in half, just as an oil-burner which isto keep a six-room apartment at a comfortable temperature will prove a failure when called upon to perform a similar service for a twelve-room flat.

What makes the job of our celestial stove even more complicated is the fact that the sun must also keep the atmosphere which surrounds us at an even temperature. But she cannot do this directly.She must do it indirectly, via the earth.

On their way to our planet the sun rays pass through the atmosphere, but they pass through so easily and quickly that they hardly influence the temperature of that faithful terrestrial blanket. Then they hit the earth and the earth stores up the heat and slowly surrenders part of it into the atmosphere.That fact, incidentally, explains why it is so cold on the top of a mountain.For the higher we get, the less the heat of the earth has been able to make itself felt.If（as used to be supposed）the sun heated the atmosphere directly and the atmosphere in its turn heated the earth, it would be just the other way around and our mountain tops would not be covered with snow.

And now we come to the most difficult part of the problem. Air is not just“air”in our sense of the word.It has both substance and weight.The lower layers of air therefore are under a much higher pressure than the higher ones.When you want to flatten out a leaf or a flower you put it between the pages of a book and then put twenty other volumes on top of it because you know that the pressure will be greatest in the book that is at the bottom of the pile.The pressure under which we human beings live is considerably more than most of us suspect.It is fifteen pounds per square inch.That means that we would be crushed flat except for the fortunate circumstance that we are filled with the same air as that which surrounds us.Even so，30，000 pounds（the pressure upon a body of average size）is a respectable amount.If you have any doubts upon the subject, try to lift a small freight-car.

Within the realm however of the atmosphere itself that pressure is constantly changing. We know this through the invention of Evangelista Torricelli, a pupil of Galileo, who early during the seventeenth century gaveus the barometer, that well-known instrument by which we are able to measure the pressure of the air at any time of day or night.

As soon as the first of these Torricellian tubes had been placed upon the market, people began to experiment with them. They noticed that the pressure fell by about an inch for every 900 feet one ascended above sea-level.Then followed another discovery which did so much to make meteorology, the study of atmospheric phenomena, such a reliable science in forecasting the weather.

Certain physicists and geographers began to suspect that there was a definite connection between the pressure of the air and the direction of the prevailing winds or vice versa. But in order to establish some irrefutable law regulating the behavior of all air-currents, it was first of all necessary to spend several centuries collecting the data from which to draw a few definite conclusions.When this had been done, it was shown that certain parts of the world enjoyed an air pressure well above that of the mean sea-level, while others had pressures far below the mean sea-level.The first of these were then called high-pressure areas and the second low-pressure areas.Next it was definitely established that winds would always tend to blow from high-pressure areas to low-pressure areas and that the velocity and strength of the wind would depend upon the highness of the high-pressure area and the lowness of the low-pressure area.And when the high-pressure was very high and the low-pressure was very low, then we would have a very violent wind—a storm, a cyclone or a hurricane.

The winds not only keep our living quarters, the earth, decently ventilated, but they also play a great role in the distribution of that rain without which a normal development of plant life and animal life would be completely impossible.

Rain is merely evaporated water from the oceans and from the inland seas and from the inland snow-fields, which is carried along by the air in the form of vapor. As hot air can hold much more vapor than cold air, the water-vapor will be carried along without much difficulty until the air grows colder.Then part of it gets condensed and falls back again upon the surface ofthe earth in the form of rain or hail or snow.

The rainfall of any given region therefore will depend almost entirely upon the winds to which it is exposed. If we have a sea-coast separated from the mainland by mountains（a very common occurrence）the coastal region will be wet and damp.For the wind, being forced to rise into higher regions（where the pressure is lower），will cool off as it gets further and further away from the sea-level and it will shed its vapor in the form of rain and snow and will reappear on the other side of the mountain range as a dry wind without a drop of moisture.

The rainfall of the tropics is both regular and abundant because the enormous heat of the land makes the air rise to a great height, where it gets cooled off and is obliged to let go of most of its vapor, which thereupon returns to earth in the form of heavy sheets of rain. But as the sun does not always stand right over the equator, but moves slightly from north to south, most of the equatorial regions enjoy four seasons, two seasons during which there are terrific rainstorms and two seasons during which the weather is dry.

But those regions which are exposed to steady air-currents running from colder to warmer regions are by far the worst off. For as the winds pass from the cold area to the hot one, their capacity for absorption becomes steadily greater and they are unable to release the vapor they carry, causing many parts of this earth to be turned into deserts where it may not rain more than once or twice every ten years.

So much for the general subject of wind and rain. A detailed discussion will follow when we describe each individual country.

And now a few words about the earth itself, and about that thin crust of hardened rock on which we live.

There are a great many theories about the true inner nature of our planet, but our definite knowledge upon the subject is still exceedingly vague.

Let us be honest. How high have we ever been up in the air or how low down into the bowels of the earth？

On a globe of three feet in diameter, the highest mountain in the world, Mt. Everest, would show about as thick as a thin piece of tissue paper and the deepest hole in the ocean, just east of the Philippine Islands, would be represented by a dent of the size and shape of a postage stamp.Well, we have never yet descended to the bottom of the ocean and we have never yet climbed Mt.Everest.We have been a little higher than the top of this Himalayan giant in balloons and flying machines, but when all is said and done, even after the recent successful flight of the Swiss Professor Piccard，29/30 of the atmosphere still remain to be explored.As for the water, we have never yet descended below 1/40 of the total depth of the Pacific Ocean, and incidentally, the depth of the deepest sea is greater than the height of the highest mountain.Why this should be we do not know, but if we dumped the highest mountains of the different continents into the deepest part of the ocean, the tops of Mt.Everest and Aconcagua would still be several thousand feet below the surface of the sea.

In the light of our present-day knowledge however these puzzling facts prove nothing at all about the origin and the subsequent development of the crust of the earth. Neither（as our grandfathers so fondly hoped）need we turn to our volcanoes for an answer about the true inner nature of our planet, for we have come to realize that those are not outlets for the hot substance that is supposed to fill the interior of the earth.If the comparison were not quite so unsavory, I would like to compare them to boils on the skin of the earth, nasty afflictions but purely local affairs which never penetrate very deep into the body of the patient.

In round numbers there are still some 320 active volcanoes left. There used to be 400 others on the active list, but these have since been retired and pensioned off with the rank of ordinary or common mountains.

The great majority of all these volcanoes are situated near the sea-coast. Indeed, the most restless part of the world's crust, Japan（where the seismograph shows a slight volcanic disturbance four times every day or 1，447 times a year）is an island, and so were Martinique and Krakatoa, the most tragic victims of recent volcanic outbursts.

In view of the close proximity of sea to volcano, it was quite natural that people should have tried to explain all volcanic eruptions as the result of water seeping into the inner part of the earth, thereby causing a sort of gigantic boiler explosion with the well-known disastrous results of an overflow of lava and steam and what have you. But since then we have discovered several very busy volcanoes hundreds of miles away from the sea, and that theory too has therefore come to naught.Ask me again about all this two centuries hence for at the present moment we can only shake our heads and repeat，“We do not know.”

Meanwhile, what about the surface of the earth itself？We used to talk so glibly about the rock of ages that would forever defy the changes of time. Modern science is less confident and regards this rock and all other rocks as something living and therefore subject to constant change.The rain raineth upon it and the wind bloweth upon it and together they cause the mountains to wither away at the rate of three inches every ten centuries.If there were no counter-moves to offset these erosive attacks, all our mountains would have disappeared long ago and even the Himalayas would have been turned into a vast plain in about 116，000，000 years.But there are counter-activities and plenty of them.

In order to get at least a vague idea of what is really happening all around us, take half a dozen clean handkerchiefs and spread them out flat on the table, one on top of the other. Then push all six together by moving your hands very slowly towards each other.You will get a pile of curiously wrinkled linen with mountains and valleys and folds and counter-folds all over it and that pile of curiously wrinkled linen will bear a very close resemblance to the crust of the earth.That crust is part of an enormous structure racing through space and constantly losing some of its heat.Like all things that are cooling off, it is slowly contracting.As you probably know, when an object contracts, the outer surface will get curiously rumpled and creased like a couple of handkerchiefs being pushed together.

The best guess at the present moment（but remember that it is only aguess）tells us that the diameter of the earth has shrunk some thirty miles since the beginning of our independent existence as a planet. That does not seem very much when you think of it as a straight line.But remember the tremendous scope of the curved planes with which we are dealing.The surface of the world is 196，950，000 square miles.A sudden change of only a few yards in diameter would be enough to cause a catastrophe which none of us would survive.

Nature therefore works very slowly her wonders to perform. She insists upon maintaining a proper balance in everything she does.When she allows one sea to run dry（our own Salt Lake is rapidly dwindling away, the Lake of Constance in Switzerland will be gone in another 100，000 years）she starts another one in some other part of the world；and when she permits certain mountain-ranges to disappear（the Alps in central Europe will be as flat as our prairies in another 60，000，000 years）then another part of the crust in a totally different corner of the globe is slowly being reshaped and wrinkled into a fresh mountain-range.That, at least, we believe to be the case, although as a rule the process is by far too slow and gradual to allow us to make any concrete observations of the changes that are taking place.

There is however an exception to this general rule. When left to herself, Nature is in no particular hurry.But when aided and abetted by man, she sometimes proves herself an uncomfortably fast worker.And ever since man became truly civilized and invented his little steam-engines and his little sticks of dynamite, the surface of the earth has been transformed so rapidly that our great-grandparents would hardly recognize their own pastures and gardens, were they to come back to us for a little holiday.Our greed for timber and the ruthlessness with which we have denuded whole mountain-ranges of their blanket of forests and shrubs have turned vast regions into primeval wildernesses.For as soon as the forests were gone, that fertile soil which for so many years had faithfully clung to the rocky surface of the hill-sides was brutally washed away and the barren slopes became a menace to the surrounding country-side.The rain was then no longer held captive by the turf and by the roots of the trees, but was able to rush down towards the plains intorrents and cataracts, destroying everything it met on its way towards the valleys and plains.

And this unfortunately is not said in a flight of high rhetorical exaggeration. We don't have to go back to the glacial periods when, for reasons as yet unexplained, the whole of northern Europe and northern America lay buried beneath a heavy blanket of ice and snow which dug such dangerous grooves through entire mountain-ranges.We need only go as far back as the era of the Romans, who were first-rate exploiters（weren't they the“practical men”of antiquity？）and who in less than five generations completely changed the climate of their own peninsula by the senseless destruction of everything that had thus far helped to make Italy a country of well-balanced and even temperature.And what the Spaniards did to the mountains of South America, when they allowed the fertile terraces, built by countless generations of patient little Indians, to go to ruin, is a fact of such recent occurrence as to need no further elucidation.

Of course that was the easiest way to deprive the natives of their livelihood and reduce them to obedience by way of starvation—just as the extinction of the buffaloes by our own government was the most practical method of turning fierce warriors into dirty, slovenly reservation-parishioners. But these cruel and senseless measures carried their own punishment with them, as any one familiar with our plains or the Andes will tell you.

Fortunately this is one of the few problems of practical geographical importance which has at last penetrated to the consciousness of those who sit in the seats of the mighty. No government today would any longer tolerate such scandalous interference with the soil upon which all of us depend for our well-being.We have no control over the cosmic changes which take place in the crust of our planet.But to a certain extent we can control a vast number of details which make for a greater or smaller rainfall in any given territory and which will prevent fertile regions from being turned into howling deserts.We may not know anything about the inside of this earth, but we have at least learned a great many things about the outside.And every day we add to thetotal sum of this useful bit of information and use it wisely for the benefit of all.

But I regret to say that we have no such control over the greater part of the earth's surface—that part which we call the oceans and the seas. Almost three-quarters of our globe are uninhabitable because they are covered by a layer of water, differing in depth from a couple of feet（near the shore）to almost 35，000 feet in the famous“deep hole”just east of the Philippines.

This layer of water can be roughly divided into three main parts. The most important of these is the Pacific Ocean which covers 68，500，000 square miles.The Atlantic Ocean covers 41，000，000 square miles and the Indian Ocean 29，000，000.Inland seas account for another 2，000，000 square miles, while lakes and rivers take up about 1，000，000 square miles of their own.All this submerged territory was and is and always will remain lost to us as a place of residence, unless we are able to redevelop those gills which our ancestors of a few million years ago possessed and of which we still show the traces on the day of our birth.

This abundant supply of water may at first seem a complete waste of perfectly good territory and it may make us regret that our planet is as wet as it happens to be. For when we remember that 5，000，000 square miles of the land that is at our disposal are desert and that 19，000，000 square miles are steppes or plains of the semi-useless Siberian variety, while a considerable number of other millions of square miles are uninhabitable because they are either too high for us to live in（like the Himalayas and the Alps）or too cold（like the territory around the North and South Poles）or too wet（like the swamps of South America）or too densely covered with forests（like the forests of central Africa）and must therefore be deducted from the 57，510，000 square miles that are listed as“land”，we feel that we could make excellent use of a few more miles of added territory.

But it is extremely doubtful whether we could exist at all if it were not for this vast reservoir of heat, which we call the sea. The geological remnants of prehistoric times show us conclusively that there have been times when therewas more land and less water than today, but invariably these were periods of intense cold.The present balance of 4：1 between water and land is an ideal one if our present climate is to continue indefinitely, and we shall all of us be much better off if it does not get disturbed.

This vast ocean which encircles the entire globe（in this respect the ancients had guessed right）is, like the solid crust of the earth, in constant motion. The moon and the sun, through their power of gravity, attract it and cause it to rise to a considerable height.Then there is the heat of the day which takes part of it away in the form of vapor.The cold of the polar regions covers it with ice.But from a practical point of view as something directly affecting our own well-being, the air-currents or winds must be accorded first rank for their influence upon the surface of the ocean.

When you blow long enough on your plate of soup, you will notice that the soup begins to move in the direction away from your mouth. When certain air-currents hit the surface of the ocean for years and years in succession, they will cause“drifts，”which will move in a direction away from that particular current.Whenever there are a number of air-currents blowing from different directions, these different“drifts”will neutralize each other.But when the winds are steady, as they are for example on both sides of the equator, the drifts become veritable currents and these currents have played a very important role in the history of the human race and in making certain parts of the world inhabitable which otherwise would be as cold as Greenland's icy shores.

A map of these ocean rivers（for that is what many of those currents really are）will show you where they are located. The Pacific Ocean has a number of such currents.The most important of these, as important in its way as the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic, is the Japan current or Kuro Siwo（which means the Blue Salt Current）which is caused by the north-east trade-winds.After having done its duty by Japan, it crosses the northern Pacific and bestows its blessings upon Alaska, which it keeps from being too cold for human habitation, and then, turning sharply towards the south, gives California its agreeable climate.

But when we speak of ocean currents, we think first of all of the GulfStream, that mysterious river, some fifty miles wide and 2000 feet deep, which for untold centuries has kept the northern part of Europe well supplied with the tropical heat of the Gulf of Mexico and which accounts for the fertility of England, Ireland and all the North Sea countries.

The Gulf Stream has an interesting career of its own. It begins with the famous North Atlantic Eddy, a drift rather than a current, which like a gigantic maelstrom turns around and around in the central part of the Atlantic and enfolds within itself that pool of semi-stagnant water which has become the home of billions of little fishes and floating plants and which, as the Sargasso or“Sea-Weed Sea”，played a most important part in the history of early navigation.For once the trade-winds（the eastern winds that blew just north of the tropics）had blown your ship into the Sargasso Sea, you were lost.At least, that is what the sailors of the Middle Ages firmly believed.Your vessel would find itself caught by miles and miles of solid sea-weed and every one on board would slowly perish through hunger and thirst, while the ghastly wreck would remain forever bobbing up and down beneath the cloudless sky as a silent warning to others who might be tempted to defy the Gods.

When finally Columbus sailed placidly through the heart of this dullish stretch of water, it was shown that the fairy story about miles and miles of solid sea-weed had been grossly exaggerated. But even today there is something mysterious and uncanny to most people in that name, Sargasso Sea.It sounds medieval.It smacks of one of Dante's infernal circles.Actually, however, it is no more exciting than the swan-pond in Central Park.

But to return to the Gulf Stream. Part of the North Atlantic Eddy finally finds its way into the Caribbean Sea.There it is joined by a current that moves westward from the coast of Africa.These two currents, in addition to its own water, are too much for the Caribbean Sea.Like a cup that has been poured too full, it flows over into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf of Mexico has not got room for all this additional humidity and, using the straits between Florida and Cuba as a spigot, it pours forth a broad stream of hot water（80°F）which thereupon is called the Gulf Stream. Whenthe Gulf Stream leaves the spigot, it flows at the rate of five miles an hour, which is one of the reasons why the old sailing vessels gave it a wide berth whenever they could and preferred to make a lengthy detour rather than try to navigate against a current which so severely delayed their own progress.

From the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf Stream moves up northward, following the American coast until finally it is deflected by the shape of the eastern shore, when it begins its voyage across the north Atlantic. Just off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland it meets its own offspring, the so-called Labrador Current, which, coming fresh from the glacial regions of Greenland, is as cold and uninviting as the Gulf stream is warm and hospitable.Out of the meeting of these two mighty currents arises that terrible fog which has given that part of the Atlantic such a dreadful reputation.It also accounts for the presence of that large number of icebergs which have played such a hideous role in the nautical history of the last fifty years.For, cut off by the summer's sun from their solid Greenland moorings（those glaciers that still cover ninety percent of that vast island）these bergs drift slowly southward until they are caught by the eddy caused by the meeting of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current.

There they mill around while they slowly melt. But this melting process is what makes them so dangerous, for only the tops remain visible while the ragged edges stay under water, just deep enough to cut through the hull of a ship as a knife cuts through butter.That whole region today is forbidden territory for all ocean liners and it is constantly watched by United States patrol vessels（a special ice patrol, paid for by all nations）who blow up the smaller bergs and warn vessels of the presence of the bigger ones.Fishing boats, however, love this territory, for fishes who were born in the Arctic and were therefore accustomed to the cold temperature of the Labrador Current feel very unhappy in the tepid water of the Gulf Stream.While they are slowly making up their minds whether to go back to the Pole or try to swim across the warm Gulf Stream, they are caught by the nets of those French fishermen whose ancestors patronized the legendary Grand Banks of America hundreds of yearsbefore any one else.The two little islands of St.Pierre and Miquelon, off the Canadian coast, are not only the last remaining remnants of that vast French empire which two centuries ago covered the greater part of the North American continent.They also bear silent witness to the courage of the Nor many fishermen who had visited our shores at least a hundred and fifty years before Columbus was born.

As for the Gulf Stream, after leaving the so-called Cold Wall（produced by the difference in temperature between the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current）well to the north, it then leisurely moves across the Atlantic Ocean and spreads fan-wise over the coast of western Europe. It touches Spain and Portugal and France and England and Ireland and Holland and Belgium and Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula, and bestows upon all these countries a much milder temperature than they would otherwise enjoy.Having thus done its duty by humanity this strange current, carrying more water than all the rivers of the world combined, withdraws discreetly into the Arctic Sea.This sea thereupon finds itself so full of aquatic substance that it must find relief by sending out a current of its own, that Greenland Current which in turn is responsible for that Labrador Current I have just described.

It is a fascinating story.

It is such a fascinating story that I am sorely tempted to give by far too much space to this chapter alone. But that I must not do.

This chapter can only be a background—a general background of meteorology and oceanography and astronomy against which the actors in our play shall shortly act their part.

Now let us drop the curtain for a second.

When it rises, the stage is set for a new act.

That act will show you how men learned to find their way across those mountains and seas and deserts that had to be conquered ere we could truly call this world our home.

The curtain rises again.

Act　Ⅱ：Maps and methods of navigation.4.地图。非常简洁的一章但却描述了一个庞大而吸引人的话题。关于人们慢慢学会了如何在这个行星上找到路线的几点观察/Maps.A very Brief Chapter upon a Very Big and Fascinating Subject.Together with a Few Observations on the Way People Slowly Learned How to Find Their Way on This Planet of Ours导读

虽然古巴比伦人、埃及人、希腊人和亚历山大都对地理有不同角度的理解和考究，但地图并不是遗迹、碎片和直线。统治世界的罗马人始终没有真正的属于自己帝国的地图。在中世纪的地图中，耶路撒冷是世界的中心，印度和西班牙被放在最偏远的边界。

直到15世纪航海术取得发展后，地图才有了较大的改进。由于土耳其人将通往东方的陆地交通阻断，因此航海成为必要。而要在没有任何标记的条件下穿越海洋只能依赖航海手段的进步。

埃及人知道鸽子能够找到最短的路线，所以他们总是带着鸽子。有经验的船长则通过北极星和星座确定方向。成吉思汗将指南针带给了世界，使得从水路到达世界任何地方成为现实，但是只有一个指南针是不够的，还必须有图表告诉我们指南针在各地的偏差有多少。地图的演变

除此之外，中世纪的船长还靠两种装置的帮助来找出自己所处的海洋——测深锤线和测速器。但是即便船长知道船只的速度以及航行的方向，潮汛和海风仍然会扰乱计算。只有找到教堂塔楼的代替品，航海才有突破的可能。

首先要找到“固定点”，然后剩下的就相对简单了，这只是一个角度问题。对经度和纬度的探索依赖于现代航海学。在几何学发展之前，这门科学不可能取得进步。“固定点”最合适的选择是北极星，没有人找不到它。从赤道到两级分出90份，固定出了纬度；0°经度则固定为格林尼治经线，然后向东向西180等分。从此，海员有了自己的海上定位。

随后，六分仪尤其是精密计时器的发明显著地促进了航海业的发展。如今，无线电的应用完全取代了这种复杂的计算。但是，他们的努力使得航海在当时成为可能，努力并没有白费。

WE are so accustomed to maps that it is almost impossible for us to imagine a time when there were no maps, when the notion of travelling according to a map was as foreign to man's conception of ultimate possibilities as the idea of traversing space in the form of a mathematical formula would be to us today.

The ancient Babylonians, who were such excellent geometrists that they could make a cadastral survey of their entire kingdom（that survey was made in 3800 B. C.，or 2400 years before Moses was born），have left us a few clay tablets containing what must have been an outline of their domains, but these were hardly maps in our sense of the word.The Egyptians, in order to get every penny of taxes they could sweat out of their hard-working subjects, also made a survey of their kingdom, which showed that they knew enough about practical mathematics to perform this difficult task.But no maps in the modern sense of the word have so far been found in any of the royal sepulchres.

The Greeks, the most curious-minded and nosey people of the ancientworld, wrote endless treatises upon the subject of geography, but we know next to nothing about their maps. Here and there in some great commercial center there seem to have been engraved bronze tablets showing the best route to be followed if a merchant wanted to get from one part of the eastern Mediterranean to another.But none of these tablets has ever been dug up and we have no idea what they looked like.Alexander the Great, who covered greater distances than any other human being before him and very many after him, must have been possessed of a certain“geographical sense”，for he maintained a special body of professional“pacers”—men who went ahead of the army and kept an accurate account of the distances the indefatigable Macedonians wandered on their search for the gold of India.But of regular maps, which would have been understandable to ourselves, not a vestige, not a scrap, not a line.

The Romans, who in quest of plunder（the most marvellously organized“systematic plunderers”of which the world has any account until the beginning of the great colonial epoch in Europe）went everywhere, lived everywhere, built roads everywhere, gathered taxes everywhere, hanged and crucified people everywhere, left the ruins of their temples and swimming-pools everywere, seem to have been able to administer a world-empire without a single map worthy of the name. It is true their writers and orators quite frequently make mention of their maps and assure us that these were of remarkable accuracy and entirely dependable.But the only Roman map that has come down to us（if we except a small and insignificant piece of an ancient plan of Rome in the second century of our era）is something so primitive and clumsy that it is of no earthly value to modern man except as a historical curiosity.

It is known to historians as the Peutinger map because it was a man by the name of Conrad Peutinger, the town clerk to the city of Augsburg, who first conceived the idea of having it broadcasted by means of the recently invented printing-presses of Johann Gutenberg of Strassburg. Unfortunately Peutinger did not have the original to work from.The manuscript map he used was athirteenth-century copy of a third-century original and during those thousand years, rats and mice had made away with a great many important details.

Even so, the general outline was undoubtedly that of the Roman original and if that was the best the Romans could do, they still had a great deal to learn. I will draw a copy of it here and let you judge for yourself.After a long and patient study of the document you will slowly begin to recognize what was in the mind of the Roman geographers.But you will also recognize that we have made enormous progress since the days when this spaghetti-shaped“world”was the last word in travel literature for a Roman general bound for England or the Black Sea.

As for the maps of the Middle Ages, we can pass them by without any special comment. The Church frowned upon all“useless scientific pursuits”.The road to Heaven was more important than the shortest route from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Danube, and maps became mere funny pictures, full of headless monsters（the poor Eskimos, huddled in their furs until their heads were no longer visible, were the originals for this fanciful notion）and snorting unicorns and spouting whales and hippogrifs and krakens and mermaids and griffons and all the other denizens of a world bewildered by fear and superstition.Jerusalem was of course shown as the center of the world, and India and Spain were the ultimate limits, beyond which no man could hope to travel, and Scotland was a separate island, and the Tower of Babel was ten times as big as the entire city of Paris.

Compared to these products of the medieval cartographers, the woven maps of the Polynesians（they look for all the world like something done by the children in a kindergarten, but they are exceedingly handy and very accurate）are veritable master pieces of the navigator's ingenuity. Not to mention the work of the contemporary Arabs and Chinese, who however were ruled out as contemptible heathen.Nor was there any real improve ment until the end of the fifteenth century when navigation was at last elevated to the rank of a science.

For then the Turks conquered the bridge-head connecting Europe with Asia, land traffic into the Orient was permanently interrupted, and it suddenlybecame necessary to find a new way to the Indies by way of the open sea. That meant an end to the old familiar system of sailing by the church-towers of the nearest mainland or sailing by the sound of the dogs barking along the waterfront.And it was this necessity of finding one's way across the ocean without seeing anything at all for weeks at a time except sky and water which brought about the great improvement in the navigating methods of that day.

The Egyptians seem to have ventured as far as Crete but no further, and even then the visits to the big island seem to have been more a matter of having been blown out of one's course than the result of a well-planned voyage of discovery. The Phoenicians and the Greeks were“church-tower sailors”at heart, although a few times they did quite remarkable things and even ventured forth as far as the Congo River and the Scilly Islands.Even then they undoubtedly hugged the shore as much as possible and at night pulled their boats up on dry land to escape being blown towards the open sea.As for the medieval merchants, they stuck to the Mediterranean, to the North Sea and to the Baltic, and were never for more than a few days without a glimpse of some distant mountainrange.

If they found themselves lost in the open, they had only one way in which to discover where the nearest land might be. For that purpose they always carried a few pigeons.They knew that pigeons would take the shortest route to the nearest bit of dry land.When they no longer knew what course to follow, they set one of their pigeons loose and observed the way it flew.Then they steered in that general direction taken by the bird until they saw the mountain tops and could make for the nearest harbor to ask where they might happen to be.

Of course during the Middle Ages even the average person was more familiar with the stars than we are today. He had to be because he lacked all sorts of information which nowadays comes to us in the printed form of almanacs and calendars.The more intelligent skippers therefore could find their way by studying the stars and by setting their course according to the Polar Star and the constellations.But in northern climes, where the sky was usually overcast, the stars were no great help.And navigation would havecontinued to be a painful and costly business of sailing by God and by guess（mostly the latter）if it had not been for a foreign invention which reached Europe shortly after the first half of the thirteenth century.But the origin and the history of the compass are still shrouded in deep mystery and what I tell you here is a matter of speculation rather than formal knowledge.

Genghis Khan, a little, slant-eyed Mongolian who during the first half of the thirteenth century ruled an empire slightly larger than any other that ever existed（it reached from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic and maintained itself in Russia until 1480）seems to have carried some sort of compass with him when he crossed the vast central Asiatic deserts, bound for the fleshpots of Europe. But it is impossible to say when the sailors of the Mediterranean had their first glimpse of this“blasphemous invention of the Devil”，as the Church people called it, which soon afterwards was to carry their vessels to the ends of the earth.

Inventions of that sort, which are of world-wide importance, all seem to start in the same vague way. Some one returning from Jaffa or Famagusta probably brought a compass with him which he had bought from a merchant in Persia, who had told him that he had got it from some one who had just returned from India.The rumor spread through the ale-houses of the waterfronts.Others wanted to see the funny little needle that had been bewitched by Satan and that would tell you where the north was, no matter where you happened to be.Of course, they did not believe such a thing could be true.Nevertheless, they asked their friend to bring them one too the next time he came back from the East.They even gave him the money, and six months later they had a little compass of their own.The darned thing worked！Then everybody must have a compass.Merchants in Damascus and Smyrna received hurry calls for more compasses.Instrument-makers in Venice and Genoa began to fabricate compasses on their own account.Suddenly we hear of compasses in every part of Europe.And within a few years the little glass-covered metal box had become such a common place sight that no one ever thought it worthwhile to write a book about an instrument that everybodyhad long since taken for granted.

So much for its career which must forever remain shrouded in mystery. But as for the compass itself, our knowledge about it has made great progress since the first sensitive needle guided the first Venetians from their lagoons to the delta of the Nile.For example, we have discovered that the needle of the compass does not point to the true north except on a few spots on the globe, while at all other places it points either a little to the east or a little to the west—a difference which is technically known as the“variation of the compass”.This is due to the fact that the magnetic north and south poles do not coincide with the north and south poles of our planet but are several hundred miles toward the south and the north of the geographic poles.The northern magnetic pole is located in the island of Boothia Felix, an island to the north of Canada, where Sir James Ross first located it in 1831，and the southern magnetic pole is situated at 73°S.Lat.and 156°E.Long.

It follows therefore that it is not enough for a captain to have merely a compass on board. He must also have charts which show him the variations of his compass in different parts of the world.That however has to do with the science of navigation and the present volume is no handbook on navigation.Navigation is an exceedingly difficult and complicated branch of learning which refuses very positively to let itself be reduced to simple little words of one syllable.For our present purpose it is enough if you will kindly remember that the compass made its entry into Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and that it was of tremendous help in making navigation a reliable science, and not merely a matter of fortunate guessing and hopelessly complicated calculations, which were far beyond the mental reach of most people.

But that was only a beginning.

One could now tell whether one were sailing north or north by-east or north-north-east or north-east-by-north or north-east or north-east-by-east or in any of the other thirty-two“general directions”indicated by the compass. But for the rest, the medieval skipper had only two other instruments to help himfind out in what part of the ocean he might happen to find himself.

In the first place, there was the lead-line. The lead-line was almost as old as the ships themselves.It would show the depth of the sea at any given point and if one had a chart indicating the different depths of the sea through which one was slowly wending one's way, the lead-line would give some indication of the approximate neighborhood in which one found one's self.

And then there was the log. The log originally was a small log of wood which was thrown overboard from the bow and which was then closely watched to see how long it would take before it passed the stern.As the length of the ship from stern to bow was of course known, one could then figure out how much time the vessel needed to pass a given point and that would show（more or less）how many miles the ship was making per hour.

The log of wood was gradually given up for the log-line, a long and thin but very strong piece of rope with a triangular piece of wood at the end. This rope had been beforehand divided into so many pieces by means of“knots”made at regular intervals and it was heaved overboard at the same time that another sailor started a sand-glass running.When all the sand had run through the glass（one knew of course beforehand how long that would take, two or three minutes）one pulled in the line and counted the knots that had run through one's hands while the sand-glass was emptying its contents from one bulb into the other.After that, a very simple calculation would show how fast the vessel was going, or as sailors used to say，“how many knots”.

But even if the captain knew the speed of his ship and the general direction it was following, there were the currents and the tides and the winds to upset even the most careful of his calculations. As a result an ordinary ocean voyage, even long after the introduction of the compass, remained a most hazardous undertaking.The people who worked on the theoretical end of the problem realized that in order to make it something else, they would have to find a substitute for the old church-tower.

I am not trying to be funny when I say this. The church tower or the tree on top of the high dune or the windmill on the dike or the barking of awatch-dog had been of such tremendous importance in the realm of navigation because it was a fixed point, something that would not change its position, no matter what happened.And given one such“fixed point”，the sailor could then make his own deductions.“I must go further towards the east，”he would say to himself, remembering the last time he had been in that part of the world, or“further towards the west or south or north to arrive where I want to be”.And the mathematicians of that day（brilliant men, by the way, who, considering the scanty information and the faulty instruments at their disposal, did as good work as was ever done in their particular field）knew perfectly well where the crux of the situation lay.They must find a“fixed point”in nature to act as a substitute for the“fixed point”established by man.

They began their search about two centuries before Columbus（I am mentioning his name because 1492 is the one date every man, woman and child seems to know）and they have not finished it even in this day of wireless time-signals and under-water signals and mechanical steering-gears, when the“Iron Mike”has about driven the old helmsman out of his job.

Suppose you find yourself standing on a round ball at the foot of a tower on top of which there waves a flag. That flag will then be right straight over your head and as long as you remain at the foot of your tower it will be right straight over your head.But if you move away from it and try to look at it, you must lift your eyes at an angle, and that angle will depend upon the distance you are away from the tower, as you will see by studying this picture.

And once this“fixed spot”had been discovered, the rest would be comparatively easy, for it would all be a matter of angles, and even the Greeks had known how to measure angles, for they had laid the foundation for the science of trigonometry which deals with the relationship between the sides and the angles of the triangle.

This brings us to the most difficult part of this chapter, indeed, I might say of the entire book—the search for what we now call latitude and longitude. The true method to establish one's latitude was discovered hundreds of years before longitude.

Longitude（now that we know how to find it）looks much simpler than latitude. But it offered certain almost insurmountable difficulties to our clockless ancestors.Whereas latitude, being merely a matter of careful observation and even more careful figuring, was something they were able to solve at a comparatively early date.But enough of generalities.Here the problem is, stated as simply as I know how.

You will notice a number of planes and angles. At D you find yourself right beneath the top of the tower, just as you will be standing almost right beneath the sun at 12 o'clock noon if you happen to be on the equator.When you have moved to E the matter becomes a little more complicated.The world on which you stand is round and you need a flat plane if you are to indulge in any figuring of angles.Therefore you draw a line from the imaginary center of the earth, called A, which runs through your own body and loses itself right above you in a spot called Zenith, the official astronomical name for the point of the heavens directly above the observer and which is the opposite of the Nadir, which is the point of the heavens directly under the observer.

Let us try to do this problem so that you can actually see it, for it is rather complicated. Stick a knitting-needle clean through the heart of an apple and imagine yourself on one side of that apple, sitting with your back leaning against the knitting-needle.The top of the knitting-needle is Zenith and the bottom is Nadir.Then imagine a plane that is at right angles with the place you are sitting or standing and the knitting needle.When you are standing at E that plane will be the plane called FGKH and BG will be the line on that plane from which you are making your observation.Furthermore, for the sake of convenience and in order to make the problem a little easier, kindly imagine that your eyes are in your toes, on the exact spot where your feet touch the line BG.Then look up at the top of the flag-pole on your tower and measure the angle top of flag-pole（or L），the spot where you stand（or E），and the end of your imaginary line BC, which is part of the imaginary plane FGKH, which runs at right angles with the imaginary line Zenith-A, which connects the center of the earth with the point of the heavens directly above you, theobserver.That angle, if you know anything about trigonometry, will tell you how far you are away from the tower.Move to W and repeat the process.W will become the point where you touch the imaginary line MN, which is part of the imaginary plane OPRQ which runs at right angles with the line connecting the center of the earth A with the new Zenith（the Zenith of course changes every time you move an inch）which I shall call Zenith I.Measure the angle LWM and you know how much further you are away from the tower.

You see, even in the simplest form it is still quite complicated, and that is why I shall only give you a general outline of the basic principles upon which modern navigation is based. If you intend to become a sailor, you will have to go to a special school for a number of years to learn how to make the necessary calculations；and then after you have handled your instruments and your tables and charts for twenty or thirty years, your directors may even make you a captain and trust that you will be able to take a ship from one port to the next.If you have no such ambition, you will never understand all this anyway and so you will pardon me if I make this chapter short and stick to the general idea.

Since navigation was entirely an affair of angles, no possible advance could be made in that science until trigonometry had once more been rediscovered by the people of Europe. The Greeks had laid the foundations for this science a thousand years before, but after the death of Ptolemy（the famous geographer from Alexandria in Egypt）trigonometry had been forgotten or discarded as a superfluous luxury—something a little too clever to be quite safe.But the people of India and after them the Arabs of northern Africa and Spain had no such scruples and they had nobly carried on where the Greeks had left off.These words Zenith and Nadir（both of them pure Arabic）bear witness to the fact that when trigonometry was once more admitted to the curriculum of the European schools（which happened sometime during the thirteenth century）it was a Mohammedan and not a Christian branch of learning.But during the next three hundred years, the Europeans made up for lost time.For although they were once more able to work with angles and triangles, they still found themselves faced by the problem of discovering some definitely fixed pointaway from the earth to act as a substitute for their church-tower.

The most reliable candidate for this sublime honor was the North Star. The North Star was so far away from us that it never seemed to change its position and besides, it was so easy to locate that even the dumbest shrimp-fisherman could find it, once he had lost sight of land.All he had to do was to draw a straight line through the two stars that were furthest to the right in the Big Dipper, and he couldn't miss it.And, of course, there was always the sun, but its course had never been scientifically mapped out and only the most intelligent mariners could avail themselves of its assistance.

As long as people were forced to believe that the earth was flat, all calculations were bound to be hopelessly at odds with the true state of affairs. Early during the sixteenth century there came an end to these make-shift methods.The“disc”theory was discarded for the“sphere”theory and the geographers at last came into their own.

The first thing they did was to cut the earth into two equal halves which were divided by a plane running at right angles with the line connecting the North and the South Poles. The dividing line was called the equator.The equator therefore was everywhere equally far removed from both the North and the South Pole.Next the distance between the poles and the equator was divided into ninety equal parts.Next ninety parallel lines（circles, of course, for remember the earth was round at last）were drawn between the poles and the equator, each one about sixty-nine miles away from the next, since sixty-nine miles represented one-ninetieth of the supposed distance between the pole and the equator.

Geographers gave these circles numbers, beginning from the equator and going up（or down）to the poles. The equator itself became 0°and the poles 90°.Those lines were called degrees of Latitude（the L's of the picture will make you remember how they run）and a little°placed at the right of the number was used as a convenient symbol for the word“degree”which was too long to be used in mathematical calculations.

All this meant an enormous step forward. But even so, the business ofgoing to sea remained a very dangerous experience.A dozen generations of mathematicians and sailors had to devote themselves to compiling data about the sun, giving its exact position for every day of every year and every clime before the average skipper was able to handle the latitude problem.

Then at last any reasonably intelligent sailor, provided he could read and write, was able to determine within a couple of miles how far away he was from the North Pole and from the equator or in technical terms, in what N. Lat.（degree of latitude north of the equator）or S.Lat.he might find himself.It was not quite so easy once he had crossed the equator, for then he was no longer able to fall back upon the Polar Star which is not visible on the southern hemisphere.But that problem too was eventually solved by science, and after the end of the sixteenth century latitude ceased to be a matter of concern to those who went down to the sea in ships.

There remained however the difficulty of determining one's longitude（longitude to make it easy for you to remember that the longitudinal degrees run in a vertical direction）and it took two whole centuries more before that puzzle had been successfully solved. In trying to establish the different latitudes, the mathematicians had been able to start out with two fixed points—the North Pole and the South Pole.“Here，”so they could say，“stands my church-tower, the North Pole（or the South Pole）and it will remain there until the end of time.”

But there was no East Pole and no West Pole either, because the axis of the earth did not happen to run that way. Of course one could draw an endless number of meridians, circles going around the earth and crossing both poles.But which one of these millions of meridians was the one to choose as“The Meridian”that was to divide the world into halves, so that thereafter the sailor could say，“I am a hundred miles east or west of‘The Meridian'”？The old notion of Jerusalem as the center of the earth was still strong enough to make many people demand that the meridian running through Jerusalem be recognized as Long.°or our vertical equator.But national pride prevented thisplan.Every country wanted to have Long.°run through its own capital and even today, when we are supposed to be a little more liberal-minded in this respect, there still are German, French and American maps which show Long.running through Berlin, Paris and Washington.And in the end, as England was the country which happened to do most for the advancement of nautical knowledge during the seventeenth century（when the problem of longitude was finally solved）and as all nautical affairs were then under the supervision of the Royal Observatory, built in Greenwich near London in the year 1675，the meridian of Greenwich was finally adopted as the particular meridian which was to divide the world into longitudinal halves.

Then at last the sailor had his longitudinal church-tower, but he was still faced with another difficulty. How was he to discover how many miles he was either east or west of that Greenwich meridian, once he was out on the high seas？To settle this matter for good and all, the English government in the year 1713 appointed a special“Commission for the Discovery of Longitude at Sea”which was to solve the problem by the practical expedient of offering large rewards for the best method of“determining longitude on the high seas”.A hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money, two centuries ago, and everybody set to work with a will.When the commission was finally disbanded during the first half of the nineteenth century it had spent more than$500，000 in the form of rewards for deserving inventions.

Most of their labors have long since been forgotten and the work they did has been dropped as obsolete. But two inventions, following in the wake of these generous monetary rewards, have proved to be of lasting benefit.The first of these was the sextant.

The sextant is a complicated instrument（a sort of miniature nautical observatory which one can carry under one's arm）which allows the sailor to measure all sorts of angular distances. It was direct heir to the clumsy medieval astrolabe and cross-staff and the quadrant of the sixteenth century, and, as so often happens when the whole world is looking for the same thing at the same moment, three men claimed to be the original inventors and fought bitterly forthe honor.

But the excitement caused in nautical circles by the appearance of the first sextants was mild compared to the interest shown in the chronometer when that faithful and reliable time-piece made its appearance four years later, in 1735. The chronometer, invented by John Harrison, an horological genius（he was a carpenter until he became a watch-maker），was a clock which worked so accurately that it made it possible to carry Greenwich time to any part of the world in any clime and in any form, sort or mode of conveyance.This John Harrison had been able to do by providing his clock with something he called a“compensation curve”.It altered the length of the balance-spring in proportion to the expansion or contraction caused by changes in temperature in such a way that his chronometer was practically weather-proof.

After endless and unseemly quarrels about the reward, Harrison received his hundred thousand dollars（in 1773，three years before his death）. And today, no matter where a ship happens to be, provided it carries a chronometer, it will always know what time it is in Greenwich.And since the sun revolves around the earth in twenty-four hours（it is the other way around, but I am using the expression for the sake of convenience）and passes through fifteen degrees of longitude in one hour, all we need to do in order to determine just how far we have travelled east or west of The Meridian is to first determine what time it is on the spot where we ourselves happen to be and then compare our local time with Greenwich time and note the difference.

For example, if we find（after careful calculations which every ship's officer can make）that it is twelve o'clock where we are, but two o'clock by our chronometer（which gives us the exact Greenwich time），then we know that since the sun travels through fifteen degrees in one hour（which means four minutes for every single degree）and since there is a difference of two hours between our time and that of Greenwich, that we must have travelled exactly 2×15°=30°. And we write down in the log-book（a little book so-called because before the general introduction of paper it used to be a piece of wood on which all such figures were written down with chalk）that on such and sucha day at noon our ship found itself at Long 30°West.

Today that startling invention of the year 1735 has lost a great deal of its importance. Every day at noon the Greenwich Observatory broadcasts the correct time all over the world.Chronometers are rapidly becoming superfluous luxuries.Indeed, if we are to believe our navigators, wireless telegraphy will eventually do away with all our complicated tables and our diligent calculations and computations.Then that lengthy chapter of finding one's way across those uncharted seas, where one wave looked so hopelessly much like the next that even the best of sailors could lose himself in less time than it takes to write down this sentence—then that marvellous chapter of courage and endurance and high intelligence will also have come to an end.The imposing man with the sextant will disappear from the bridge.He will sit in his cabin with a telephone clasped to his ear and he will ask，“Hello, Nantucket！（or Hello Cherbourg！）Where am I？”And Nantucket or Cherbourg will tell him.And that will be that.

But these twenty centuries of effort to make man's progress across the face of the earth safe and pleasant and profitable will not have been in vain. For they were one of the first successful experiments in international cooperation.Chinese, Arabs, Indians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Germans, they all of them did their share to help the good work along.

That particular chapter in the history of cooperation has now been closed. But there remain enough others to keep us busy for quite a long time.5.季节以及它们是怎样变化的/The Seasons and How They happen导读

由于地球绕太阳旋转，直接造就了季节的产生。闰年有366天，每四年有一个闰年，除去以两个零结尾且不能被400整除的年份。地轴与赤道平行的平面不成直角，而是呈66.5°角，这是全世界不同地区享受不同季节的直接原因。

四个重要的季节日期分别为3月21日、6月21日、9月23日和12月21日。根据66.5°这个数据，我们可以分出五个地带。通过行星仪来模拟可以帮助理解。

OUR word season is of Latin origin and it comes from the verb“serere”，which means“to sow”，“Season”should therefore be used only to indicate the spring—the“sowing time”. But very early in the Middle Ages“season”lost that exclusive connotation.Three other seasons were added to divide the year into four equal parts：the winter, or wet season；the autumn, the period of increase（the same root as in“augmentation”or“august”which is not only the“month of the increase”but also a“person of augmented importance”）；and the summer, which was the old Sanskrit name for the entire year.

Aside from their practical and their romantic interest to the human race, the four seasons have a most prosaic astronomical background, for they are the direct result of the earth's behavior on its yearly peregrination around the sun, as I shall tell you as briefly and as dully as the subject allows.

The earth turns around its own axis in 24 hours. The earth turns around the sun in about 3651/i days.To get rid of that 1/4 day and keep the calendar more or less pure（no, it is not correct, but it is extremely doubtful whether the nations just now would find time in which to agree upon a decent revision）we have a year of 366 days, or leap-year, every four years except in the years which end with two zeros, such as 900，1100，1300 or 1900.But the years which can be divided by 400 are an exception to this exception.The last exception was Anno Domini 1600.The next one will be the year of grace 2000.

The earth does not describe a perfect circle on its way around the sun, but an ellipse. It is not much of an ellipse, but enough to make the study of the earth on its course through space a great deal more complicated than if we had to deal with a perfect circle.

The axis of the earth does not stand at right angles to the plane which we could draw through the sun and our own planet, but at an angle of 661/2°.

But on its course around the sun the axis of the earth always remains at the same angle which is directly responsible for the variations in the seasons in different parts of the world.

On March 21st, the position of the earth in relation to the sun is such that the light of the sun illuminates exactly one-half of the surface of our planet. As a result, on that particular day, day and night are of equal length in every part of the world.Three months later, when the earth has finished one-fourth of her voyage around the sun, the North Pole is turned towards the sun and the South Pole is turned away from the sun.As a result, the North Pole is celebrating its yearly day of six months, while the South Pole is enjoying its yearly night of six months；and the northern hemisphere is partaking of the long, shining days of the summer, while the southern hemisphere is spending the long winterevenings reading a good book by the fireside.Remember that when we go skating at Christmas, the people in the Argentine and Chile are dying of sun-stroke, and while we suffer from our annual heat-wave, it is time for them to get their skates sharpened.

The next day of seasonal importance is the 23rd of September, because then once more the days and nights are of equal length all over the world. Then we reach the 21st of December when the South Pole has turned its face towards the sun and the North Pole has turned its back upon our source of heat.Then the northern hemisphere is cold and the southern hemisphere is warm.

But the peculiar slant of the axis of the earth, together with the earth's rotation, is not alone responsible for the change in seasons. That 661/2°angle also gives us our five zones.On both sides of the equator we have the tropical zone, where the rays of the sun hit the surface of the earth either vertically or almost vertically.The northern and southern temperate zones are those regions between the tropics and the polar regions where the sun's rays hit the earth a little less vertically and therefore have to warm a greater surface of soil or water than they do in the tropics.Until finally the two polar regions receive the rays of the sun at such an angle that even in summer each sixty-nine miles of sunlight is obliged to heat almost double that amount of land.

It is not easy to make these things clear on paper. There are planetariums where you can see all this and understand it too in much less time than you need to read this.But only very few of our cities have thought it necessary to establish such a planetarium.Go to the Board of Aldermen and tell them that you want one for a Christmas present.While they are looking this difficult word up in the dictionary（it may take them twenty or thirty years）you had better try your luck with oranges or apples and a candle and a little black ink to mark off the zones.A match will do for the North Pole and South Pole.And don't indulge in comparisons when a fly descends upon your little home-made planet.Don't say to yourself，“Supposc—just suppose—that we too should be only some sort of fly, crawling aimlessly across the surface of a gigantic orange, a gigantic orange illuminated by a gigantic candle—both of them little playthings in the hands of some colossus who wanted an afternoon's entertainment！”

Imagination is a good thing.

But not in the realm of astronomy.6.想想这个星球上的小块旱地，为什么其中一些被称为洲，而另外一些却不是/Concerning the Little Spots of Dry Land on This Planet and Why Some of Them are Called Continents While Others are not导读

亚洲、美洲、非洲、欧洲和澳洲组成了地球的陆地表面。亚洲是欧洲的4.5倍大，美洲是欧洲的4倍大，非洲是欧洲的3倍大，澳洲只比欧洲小几十万平方英里。但是欧洲独特的地理优势使其在历史发展过程中扮演了重要的角色。

地球最大陆地板块的中心——欧洲半岛以北冰洋、大西洋和地中海为界。最南端即便温暖，还是距离热带800英里。而北部在北极圈内，却由于湾流而温暖如春。欧洲多半岛和伸入陆地的海域，使得那里的气候不会太冷。

甚至灾难性的自然灾害，也会带来巨大的恩惠。其结果是将山脉放置在国家疆界处，河流恰好使内部任何地区都能直接与海洋交流，在没有铁路和汽车的世界中，促进了贸易和商业发展。

此外，那里的气候使大脑更活跃，更善于创造。只要国家安定，那里的人们便会献身于科学追求。世界各大洲——选自奥特利乌斯世界各大洲图册（1602年版）

今天，欧洲已落入二等洲的行列，不是由于世界大战而是因为飞行器的发明。

ALL of us, without exception, live on islands. But some of these islands on our planet arc so much larger than the others that we have decided to let them belong to a class of their own and have called them“continents”.A continent therefore is an island which“contains”or“holds together”more territory than just an ordinary island like England or Madagascar or Manhattan.

But there are no hard and fast rules. America and Asia and Africa, being the biggest continuous pieces of land, are continents by right of their enormous size.Europe, which to the astronomers of the planet Mars undoubtedly looks like a peninsula of Asia（a little larger perhaps than India, but not very much）has always insisted on being a continent by itself.The Australians would undoubtedly go to war if any one dared to suggest that their beloved island was not really big enough and did not have enough inhabitants to be ranked among the continents.The Greenlanders on the other hand seem quite contented to remain plain, ordinary Eskimos, although the country of their birth is twice as large as the combined area of New Guinea and Borneo, the two biggest islands on our planet.While the penguins of the South Pole, if they were not such humble and amiable creatures, might easily claim to be living on a continent, for the Antarctic region is surely as vast as all the land between the Arctic Sea and the Mediterranean.

I don't know how all this confusion arose. But the science of geography passed through many centuries of absolute neglect.During that period, erroneous notions attached themselves to the body of our geographical information as barnacles attach themselves to the keel of a ship that lies neglected in port.In the course of time（and the dark ages of our ignorance lasted about 1400 years）some of those barnacles assumed such gigantic proportions that they were finally mistaken for parts of the ship.

But rather than add to the existing confusion, I will stick to the generallyaccepted divisions and I will say that there are five continents：Asia, America, Africa, Europe and Australia, and that Asia is four and a half times as large as Europe, America four times as large, Africa three times, while Australia is a few hundred thousand square miles smaller. Asia and America and Africa therefore ought to come ahead of Europe in a handbook on geography；but if we do not merely pay attention to size but also consider the role any given part of the world has played in the historical development of the entire planet, we must begin with Europe.

Let us first of all look at the map. As a matter of fact, let us look at our maps oftener than we look at the printed page.For you might as well attempt to learn music without an instrument or swimming without water as to try to learn geography without a map.And as soon as you look at a map, or better still, if you can get hold of a globe, you will notice that the European peninsula, bounded by the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, is situated right in the heart of that part of the world which contains the greatest amount of land.Just as poor, neglected Australia happens to be situated in the exact center of that other half of our planet which contains the greatest percentage of water.That was advantage number one which Europe enjoyed, but there were others.Asia might be about five times as large as Europe but while one-quarter of all its land was too hot for comfort, another quarter was situated in such close proximity to the North Pole that no one but a reindeer or a polar bear would choose it as a permanent place of residence.

There again Europe scored, for it enjoyed certain advantages which none of the other continents did. The toe of Italy, the southernmost point, although fairly warm, is still some 800 miles removed from the tropical zone.Northern Sweden and Norway run quite a distance beyond the polar circle, but it happens that the Gulf Stream visits their shores and keeps them warm, while Labrador, in an equal latitude, is a frozen wilderness.

Furthermore, Europe has a greater proportion of peninsulas and seas that run way inland than any other continent. Just think of Spain, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Scandinavia, the Baltic, the North Sea, the Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea, the Sea of Marmora, the Gulf of Biscay, the Black Sea, and compare that situation with Africa or with South America, which has the lowest record for that sort of thing.The result of such a large body of water touching almost every part of the mainland is a very moderate climate.That means that the winters are not too cold and the summers are not too hot.Life is neither too easy nor too difficult, so that man becomes neither a loafer（as he does in Africa）nor a beast of burden（as he does in Asia）but is able to mix work and leisure in a more agreeable and useful proportion than anywhere else.标有麦哲伦航线的地图

But it was not only the climate that helped the Europeans to make themselves the masters of the greater part of our planet and to maintain themselves as such until they committed suicide during the four years of their unfortunate civil war of 1914—1918. Their geological background was another point in their favor.This, of course, was a mere accident for which they deserve no personal credit.But just the same they plucked the fruit of all those colossal volcanic eruptions and those gigantic glacial invasions and those catastrophic floods which had made their continent what it was, which had placed their mountains where they could most easily be turned into national frontiers and which made their rivers flow in such a way that practically every part of the interior enjoyed direct communication with the sea, a most important point for the development of trade and commerce before the invention of the railroad and the automobile.

The Pyrenees cut the Iberian peninsula off from the rest of Europe and became the natural frontier of Spain and Portugal. The Alps performed a similar service for Italy.The great plain of western France lay hidden behind the Cévennes, the Jura and the Vosges Mountains.The Carpathians acted as a bulwark which separated Hungary from the vast plains of Russia.The Austrian Empire, which played such an important part in the history of the last eight hundred years, consisted, roughly speaking, of a circular plain, surrounded by difficult mountain-ranges which protected it against its neighbors.Without those barriers, Austria would never have existed as long as it did.Germany too was no mere political accident.It consisted of a large square of territory whichsloped gently from the Alps and the mountains of Bohemia towards the Baltic Sea.And then there were islands, like England and those of the old Greek Aegean Sea, and swamps like Holland and Venice, all of them natural fortresses which Providence herself seemed to have placed there for the development of independent political units.

Even Russia, which we so often hear described as the result of one man's terrific desire for power（the late Peter the Great of the house of Romanov）was really much more the product of certain natural and inevitable causes than we are sometimes willing to believe. The great Russian plain, situated between the Arctic Ocean, the Ural Mountains, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Carpathians and the Baltic, was ideally situated for the foundation of a highly centralized empire.The ease with which the United Soviet Republics survived after the downfall of the Romanov dynasty seems to be conclusive proof of this.

But the rivers, too, in Europe, as 1 have already remarked, ran in such a way that they could play a most important and practical part in the economic development of that continent. Draw a line from Madrid to Moscow and you will notice that all the rivers, without any exception, run either north or south, giving every part of the interior direct access to the sea.Since civilization has always been a product of water rather than land, this fortunate aquatic arrangement was of tremendous help in making Europe the richest and therefore the dominant center of our planet until the disastrous and suicidal war of 1914—1918 made her lose that enviable position.But let the maps bear me out.

Compare Europe with North America. On our own continent two high mountain-ranges run almost parallel with the sea；and the entire middle part, the great central plain of the Middle West, has but one direct outlet to the sea, the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which run into the Gulf of Mexico, a sort of inland sea far removed from both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.Or compare Europe with Asia, where a helter-skelter wrinkling process of the earth's surface and the irregular slopes of all the mountain-ranges make the rivers run in any old direction, while the most important of those waterways, traversing the vast Siberian steppes, lose themselves in the Arctic Ocean and are of no earthly use to any one except a few local fishermen.Or with Australia, which has no rivers at all.Or with Africa, a vast central plateau which forces the rivers to break through the high fringe of mountains near the coast and prevents sea traffic from using the natural waterways to reach the interior.Then you will begin to understand why Europe, with its convenient mountain-ranges and its even more convenient river systems, with nine times as much coast-line as it would have if it were rounded off as neatly as Africa or Australia, with its moderate climate and its convenient location right in the heart of the land masses of this earth, was predestined to play the role of the leading continent.

But those natural advantages alone would not have been enough to allow this tiny corner of the world to lord it over all its neighbors. Man's ingenuity had to lend a hand.That was easy.For the climate of northern Europe was an ideal climate to stimulate men's brains into activity.It was neither too cold for absolute comfort nor too hot for a regular daily task, but just right to make one feel like doing something.As a result, the inhabitants of northern Europe, as soon as their respective countries had duly settled down and were able to guarantee their citizens that indispensable minimum of law and order without which no mental life is possible, began to devote themselves to those scientific pursuits which in the end were to make them the owners and exploiters of the four other continents.

Their mathematics and their astronomy and trigonometry taught them how to sail the Seven Seas with a reasonable assurance of being able to return whence they had come. Their interest in chemistry provided them with an internal combustion machine（that queer motor called a“gun”）by means of which they could kill other human beings and animals faster and more accurately than any other nation or tribe had ever been able to do.Their pursuit of medicine taught them how to make themselves comparatively immune against a variety of diseases which hitherto had kept whole regions of the earth in a state of chronic depopulation.And finally the comparative poverty of their own soil（poor when compared to the plains of the Ganges or themountain-ranges of Java）and the everlasting necessity of living rather“carefully”had gradually developed such deep-seated habits of thrift and greed that Europeans would go to any extreme in order to acquire the wealth without which their neighbors regarded and scorned them as regrettable failures.

As soon as the introduction of that mysterious Indian instrument known as the compass had made them independent of the church-tower and the familiar coast-line and allowed them to roam at will, and as soon as the rudder of the ship had been moved from the side to the stern（an improvement which seems to have occurred during the first half of the fourteenth century and which was one of the most important inventions of all time, since it gave man such command over the course of his vessel as he had never enjoyed before）the people of Europe were able to leave their little inland seas, the Mediterranean and the North Sea and the Baltic, and to make the gigantic Atlantic the highroad for their further exploits of a commercial and military character. Then at last they were able to make the fullest possible use of the fortunate incident which had placed their continent right in the heart of the greatest amount of land on our planet.

They maintained this advantage for more than five hundred years. The steamer succeeded the sailing vessel, but since trade has always been a matter of cheap modes of communication, Europe was able to continue at the head of the procession.And those military authors have been right who maintained that the nation with the biggest navy was also the nation that could dictate its will to the rest of the world.In obedience to this law, the Norsemen had been succeeded by Venice and Genoa, and Venice and Genoa had been succeeded by Portugal, and Portugal as a world-power had been succeeded by Spain, and Spain by Holland, and Holland by England, because each country in turn had had the largest number of battle-ships.Today, however, the sea is rapidly losing its former importance.The ocean as a highroad for commerce is being succeeded by the air.And perhaps it is not so much the Great War which has reduced Europe to the rank of a second-rate continent as the invention of the heavier-than-air flying-machine.

The son of a Genoese wool-merchant changed the course of history by discovering the unlimited possibilities of the ocean.

The owners of a simple bicycle-repair-shop in the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, did the same for the air. As a result, the children of a thousand years hence may never have heard the name of Christopher Columbus, but they will be familiar with Wilbur and Orville Wright.

For it was a product of their patient and ingenious brains more than anything else which is gradually moving the center of civilization from the Old World to the New.7.关于欧洲的发现以及生活在那里的人们/Of the Discovery of Europe and the Sort of People Who Live in That Part of the World导读

亚洲人可能是欧洲最早的定居者。西方新大陆可以提供更好的生存机会，在那里至少他们不会再挨饿了。

欧洲有三大人种，有六个较小的人种。首先是日耳曼人种，包括英国人、瑞典人、挪威人、丹麦人、荷兰人、佛兰德斯人和部分瑞士人。其次是拉丁人种，包括法国人、意大利人、西班牙人、葡萄牙人、罗马尼亚人。最后是斯拉夫人种，主要是俄罗斯人、波兰人、捷克人、塞尔维亚人、保加利亚人。他们加在一起占据了欧洲人口总数的93%。

THERE are twice as many people in Europe as there are in North and South America together. There are more people within the confines of that small continent than in America, Africa and Australia together.Only Asia has a greater number of inhabitants than Europe，950，000，000 against Europe's 550，000，000.These figures are more or less accurate for they were gathered by the International Statistical Institution connected with the League of Nations, a gathering of learned men who are able to consider such matters with a cool and detached eye and who are under no obligation to doctor the returns to please the local pride of any particular country.欧洲卫星地形图

According to that same erudite body, the average net increase in population on this planet is 30，000，000 per year. And that is a very serious matter.For at that rate of speed, the population of the world will double itself in about six centuries.And as we still have millions and millions of years to go, l hate to think what conditions will be later on, in the year 19320 or 193200 or 1932000.“Standing room only”in the subway is bad enough.“Standing room only”on our planet would be absolutely unbearable.

And yet that is the prospect before us unless we are willing to face facts and take certain measures before it is too late.

All that however belongs in a handbook on political economy. The question that faces us here is the following：where did these early settlers of the European continent, who were to play such a great role in history, come from, and were they the first to arrive upon the scene？The answer, I regret to say, must be exceedingly vague.Those people probably came from Asia and they probably entered Europe through the gap between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea and they probably found that earlier races of immigrants and older forms of civilization had preceded them.But until the anthropologists shall have gathered many more data than are now at their disposal, the story of those pre-pre-historic invaders is still too vague to be incorporated in a popular handbook of geography and we must stick to the later arrivals.

Why did they come？For the same reason that made over a hundred million people move from the Old to the New World during the last hundred years—because they were hungry and the lands toward the west offered them a better chance to survive.

These immigrants scrambled all over Europe, as the immigrants of a later day were to scatter all over the great American plains. And in the mad rush for land and for lakes（in those early days, a lake was even more valuable than a piece of land）all traces of“pure racial stock”were speedily lost.Here andthere along the more inaccessible parts of the Atlantic sea-shore or in the hidden depths of some obscure mountain valley, a few of the weaker tribes continued to vegetate, proud of their purity of race, but having little else to console them for the loss of touch with the outside world.And therefore when we speak of“race”，today, we have given up all idea of absolute ethnological purity.

We use the expression for the sake of convenience to describe certain large groups of people who happen to speak the same language（more or less）；who have a common historical origin（more or less）；and who during the last two thousand years of written history have developed certain traits of character and certain modes of thought and social behavior which have made them conscious of belonging to what, for lack of a better word, we continue to call a“racial group”.

According to this notion of race（the x of the algebraic equation, invented solely for the sake of cutting through a thousand difficulties）there are three great racial groups in the Europe of today and half a dozen smaller ones.

There are, first of all, the Germanic races, such as the English, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Flemish and part of the Swiss. Then the Latin race, including the French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Roumanians.Finally the Slavic races, consisting mainly of the Russians and the Poles, the Czechs, the Serbians and Bulgarians.Together they account for about 93% of the total population.

The rest are a couple of million Magyars or Hungarians, a slightly smaller number of Finns, about a million people of Turkish descent（in the little remnant of the old Turkish Empire around Constantinople）and some three million Jews. Then there are the Greeks, who have been so hopelessly mixed with other“races”that we can only guess at their origin but who are more closely akin to the Germanic group than to any other.Finally the Albanians, also probably of Germanic origin, who now seem a thousand years behind the times but who had been comfortably settled on their present day farms five or six centuries are the first of the Romans and Greeks made their appearance onEuropean territory.And finally the Celts of Ireland, and the Letts and Lithuanians of the Baltic Sea, and the Gypsies, of indefinite number and hazy origin, who are chiefly interesting as an historical warning of what will happen to those who come too late and who arrive just when the last piece of empty land has been occupied by some one else.

So much for the people who populated both mountains and plains of the old continent. Now we must see what they made of their geographical background and what that background in turn, made of them.For out of that struggle grew our modern world.Without it, we would still be like the beasts of the fields.8.希腊，东地中海的岩石岬角，连接古老亚洲和新兴欧洲的桥梁/Greece, the Rocky Promontory of the Eastern Mediterranean Which Acted as the Connecting Link Between the Old Asia and the New Europe导读

巴尔干半岛最南端是希腊半岛，北面以多瑙河为界，西边是亚德里亚海，东面是黑海——希腊和亚洲之间的屏障，南面地中海的对面为非洲。

巴尔干半岛上覆盖着健壮的山脉，由西北走向东南，是对角式的。两列山脉将这个地区分开，北部是巴尔干地区，像屏障一样，多瑙河被迫由东向西流动，注入黑海。但是，由于来自俄罗斯平原的疾风，半岛北部经常有雨雪。罗多彼山脉阻挡了疾风，使希腊处于温和的气候中。

真正的希腊是从塞萨利算起的。塞萨利平原有一个一个内陆海。从塞萨利出发，穿过品都斯山脉进入伊派瑞斯。伊派瑞斯被一条由爱奥尼亚海延伸出来的水路分为伊塞卡岛和科孚岛。由伊派瑞斯向南，便到达了比奥西亚。那里的人们要忍受来自科帕斯湖沼泽地区的毒气。最后，情况得到了改善，内陆海底变成了肥沃的盆地。

阿提卡为爱琴海包围呈三角形，是一个岩质岬角，那里空气清新，使得雅典人天生健康，且能保持这种健康。海洋为那里提供了便利的交通，可以到达世界的任何地方。希腊特色浮雕

雅典和罗马是当时欧洲重要的居民区。但是那里并不临海，和远洋失去了亲密联系，任何垂涎于世界统治权的民族都会把握住这个机会。雅典卫城变成了一个圣地。

希腊半岛最偏远的地区是珀罗普斯，山脉将其与海隔绝。阿卡狄亚人诚实，不偷盗，不撒谎，讨厌纪律，英勇善战。斯巴达坐落在阿卡狄亚山脉以南的拉哥尼亚平原。当雅典将其精神发扬传播到全世界之时，斯巴达却迷失了自己的精神。

半岛的另一部分是迈锡尼的废墟，迈锡尼摧毁于公元前5世纪。那里曾经是古希腊世界的中心。曾经辉煌，如今已经没落，它的昙花一现仍是个谜。这一切都是历史，历史往往造就了地理如今的面貌。

现在，希腊仍像过去那样喜欢进军海洋，但它能恢复以往的荣耀吗？虽然遭受了无数的苦难，但还有希望。

THE Greek peninsula is the southernmost point of the much larger Balkan peninsula. This is bounded on the north by the Danube, on the west by the Adriatic, which separates it from Italy, on the east by the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmora, the Bosporus and the Aegean Sea, which separate it from Asia, and on the south by the Mediterranean, which separates it from Africa.

I have never seen the Balkan peninsula from the air but it seems to me that from a high distance it must look like a hand, reaching out from Europe to Asia and Africa. Greece is the thumb.Thrace the little finger.Constantinople the nail on the little finger.The other fingers are the mountain-ranges that run from Macedonia and Thessaly to Asia Minor.Only the tops of these mountain-ranges are visible.The lower parts are covered by the waves of the Aegean, but from a great height one would undoubtedly be able to follow them as closely as the fingers of a hand partly submerged by the water in a wash-bowl.

The skin of this hand is stretched across a skeleton of sturdy mountain-ranges. In the main, these run from north-west to south-east, I might almost say, diagonal-wise.They have Bulgarian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Turkish, Albanian and Greek names but there are only a few important enoughfor you to remember.

These are the Dinaric Alps, stretching from the Alps of Switzerland to the Gulf of Corinth, the wide bay which separates the northern half of Greece from the southern half, the triangle which the early Greeks mistook for an island（small wonder, since the isthmus of Corinth which connects it with the mainland is only about three and a half miles wide）and which they called the Peloponnesus or the Island of Pelops, who, according to Greek tradition, was the son of Tantalus and a grandson of Zeus, and who at Olympia was honored as the father of all good sportsmen.

The Venetians who conquered Greece during the Middle Ages were prosaic merchants with no interest in a young man who once upon a time in his career had been served up as a roast at his father's dinner table. They found that a map of the Peloponnesus looked very much like the leaf of a mulberry-tree.And so they called it the Morea, and that is the name you will find on all modern atlases.

There are two mountain-ranges in this part of the world which have a separate existence of their own. In the north there are the Balkans which have given their name to the entire peninsula.The Balkans are merely the southern end of a half circle of hills of which the northern part is known as the Carpathians.They are cut off from the rest of the Carpathians by the socalled“Iron Gate”—the narrow ravine through which the Danube has dug itself a path on its way to the sea；and they act as a barrier which forces the Danube to run straight from east to west and to lose itself finally in the Black Sea instead of the Aegean Sea, towards which that river seems bound when it leaves the plains of Hungary.

Unfortunately, this wall separating the peninsula from Roumania is not as high as the Alps and so does not succeed in protecting the Balkan region from the chilly blasts that come blowing down from the great Russian plain. The northern part of the peninsula therefore is quite familiar with snow and ice, but ere the clouds can reach Greece they are stopped by a second wall, the Rhodope Mountains which, by their very name of the“rose-covered hills”（thesame word as you will find in rhododendron, the rose-tree, and in Rhodes, the“rose-covered island”of the Aegean），indicate a milder climate.

The Rhodope Mountains reach a height of almost 9000 feet. The highest top in the Balkans, situated near the famous Shipka pass which the Russian armies forced in September of 1877 amidst a great deal of discomfort, is only 8000 feet.The Rhodope Mountains therefore play a very important part in deciding the climate of the rest of the peninsula, and for good measure there is snow-covered Olympus，10，000 feet high, which stands sentinel over the plains of Thessaly, where the real Greece begins.

This fertile plain of Thessaly was once upon a time an inland sea. But the river Peneus（the Salambria of the modern map）cut itself a road-bed through the famous valley of Tempe, and the vast Thessalian lake emptied itself into the Gulf of Saloniki and became dry land.As for Thessaly, the granary of ancient Greece, the Turks neglected it, as they neglected everything, not so much through wickedness of heart as that hopeless Mohammedan inertia which answers all questions of immediate practical importance with a shrug of the shoulder and a brief“What is the use？”And as soon as the Turks had been driven out, the Greek money-lenders got hold of the peasants and continued where the others had left off.Today Thessaly is raising tobacco.It has one harbor, Volo, from which the Argonauts set forth on their quest of the Golden Fleece, a story that was already hoary with age long before the heroes of Troy were born.It also has one industrial town and railroad center, Larissa.

As a matter of curiosity and in order to show how strangely people got scrambled in the olden days, I might mention that this city in the heart of the Greek land of Thessaly has a negro quarter of its own. The Turks, who did not care who got killed fighting their battles for them, had imported several regiments of Sudanese natives from their Egyptian possessions to help them suppress the great Greek uprising of 1821-1829.Larissa was their headquarters during that war and after the war the poor Sudanese were forgotten.They remained stranded and they are still there.

But you will meet with stranger things than that ere we get through. Youwill hear of Red Indians in northern Africa and Jews in eastern China and horses on an uninhabited island in the Atlantic Ocean.This is much for the benefit of the“pure race”enthusiasts.

From Thessaly we cross the Pindus Mountains into the Epirus. This mountain-range, as high as the Balkans, has always been a barrier between the Epirus and the rest of Greece.Why Aristotle should have identified this part of the world with the original home of the human race will ever remain a mystery, for it is a poverty-stricken country of high hills and wandering herds of cattle, without harbors or decent roads.Of its early population little remained when the Romans on one of their campaigns sold 150，000 Epirotes into slavery（the famous Roman way of establishing law and order）.But two parts of the Epirus, separated from the mainland by narrow stretches of water from the Ionian Sea, are interesting.One is Ithaca, the legendary home of long-suffering Odysseus, and the other is Corfu, the early home of the Phaeacians, whose king, Alcionous, was the father of Nausicaa, loveliest of all women in ancient literature and an example of gracious hospitality until the end of time.Today the island（one of the Ionian islands, occupied first by Venice, later by the French, then by the English until ceded by them to Greece in 1869）is chiefly famous as the place of retreat for the defeated Serbian armies in the year 1916 and as a target for some very loose and useless shooting on the part of the Fascist navy only a few years ago.It has however a great future as a winter resort, but is undoubtedly situated on one of the great European earthquake belts.

The Dinaric Alps have a bad record as earthquake producers, while the neighboring island of Zante suffered most severely from an earthquake as recently as 1893. But earthquakes have never yet prevented people from going where it was pleasant to be and we can discount the element of danger.We shall meet with a great many volcanoes on our trip around the world and still find their gentle slopes more densely populated than the less energetic parts of the world's brittle surface.Explain this who may.I proceed from the Epirus further towards the south, and behold, Boeotia！

I mention this region, which lies like a vast, empty soup-plate between the hills of Attica towards the south and Thessaly and the mountains of the Epirus towards the north, most particularly because it is a classical example of that influence of Nature upon Man which I mentioned in the beginning of this book. To the average Greek of the good classical days, a Boeotian, although he came from the land of Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses, on the slopes of which the Delphic Oracle had established its shrine, was a clod-hopper, a heavy-witted rustic, a clown, an oaf, a lout, a gawk, a thick-skulled dunderpate, predestined for all the cheap slap-stick humor of the early stage.

And yet, the Boeotians by nature were no less intelligent than the rest of the Greeks. Epaminondas, the strategian, and Plutarch, the biographer, were Boeotians but they had left their native haunts at an early age.Those who remained behind suffered from the poisonous vapors that arose from the swamp-ridden borders of Lake Copais.In plain, modern medical terms, they probably were victims of malaria, a disease which does not tend to make people brilliantminded.

The French Crusaders, who set up as rulers of Athens during the entire thirteenth century, began to drain these quagmires, and conditions among the Boeotians improved. The Turks, of course, allowed the mosquitoes to breed to their hearts'content and the Boeotians grew worse.Finally under the new kingdom, a French and afterwards an English company let the muddy waters of Lake Copais flow into the Euboic Sea and turned the bottom of this inland sea into fertile pasture-land.

Today the Boeotian is no more Boeotian than an Athenian or Brooklyn bootblack and, Heaven knows, they are quick-witted enough to get an extra nickel out of a Scotchman or Armenian. The marshes are gone, the vapors are gone, the malaria mosquitoes are gone.And an entire country-side that had been derided for centuries as Exhibit A of rustic numskullery and ignoble imbecility was restored to normal behavior by the draining of a few miasmic swamps.

And then we come to Attica, most, interesting of the Greek lands. Nowadays we take the train that goes from Larissa to Athens and that connects with the trunk-lines to Europe.But in the olden days, those who wanted to get from Thessaly in the north to Attica in the south had only one route at their disposal, the route of the famous pass of Thermopylae.It was not really a pass in the modern sense of the word—a narrow gap between two high mountains.It was a narrow track, about 45 feet wide, between the rocks of Mount Oeta and the Gulf of Halae, which was part of the Euboic Sea.It was here that Leonidas and three hundred Spartans sacrificed themselves to the last man to save Europe from Asia, when they tried to halt the advancing hordes of Xerxes in the year 480 B.C..Two hundred years later it was here that the barbarous Gauls were prevented from invading Greece.Even as late as the years 1821 and 1822 the pass played an important military role in the war between Turks and Greeks.Today the pass is no longer visible.The sea has retreated almost three miles from the mainland and all that remains is a fifth-rate bathing establishment where people afflicted with rheumatism and sciatica try to find relief in those hot springs（“thermos”is Greek for“hot”，as you will know from“thermometer”and“thermos bottle”）which gave their name to a battle-field which shall be remembered as long as mankind continues to honor those who died in defending a lost cause.

As for Attica itself, it is a small triangle—a rocky promontory bordered by the blue waters of the Aegean Sea. Between its many hills lie numerous small valleys, all of them having direct access to the sea and kept fresh and pure by the breezes that come in from the waterfront.The ancient Athenians declared that their sharpness of wit and clearness of vision were due to the delightful air they breathed.They may have been right.There were no stagnant Boeotian pools to encourage the thrifty malaria mosquito.As a result, the Athenians were healthy and kept healthy.They were the first people to recognize that man is not divided into two equal parts, body and soul, but that body and soul are one, that a healthy body is necessary to encourage a healthy soul, that a healthy soul is an indispensable part of a healthy body.

In that air it was possible to look all the way from the Acro-polis to thePentelian Mountains that dominated the plain of Marathon and provided the city with marble. But it was not only the climate that made the Athenians what they were, and for that matter are to this very day.

There was the sea that gave the people of Attica direct access to every part of the inhabited and uninhabited world. And there was that geological freak of Nature which had dumped a steep but flat-topped miniature mountain, a sort of mesa more than 500 feet high，870 feet long and 435 feet wide, right in the heart of the plain surrounded by Mt.Hymettus（home of the best Athenian honey），by Mt.Pentelicus and by that Aegaleus from the slopes of which the unhappy fugitives from Athens watched the annihilation of the Persian fleet in the straits of Salamis a few days after the troops of Xerxes had set their city on fire.This flat-topped, steeply sloped hill had first of all attracted the immigrants from the north, for there they found what we all need—food and safety.

It is a curious fact that both Athens and Rome（or modern London or Amsterdam），the most important settlements of ancient Europe, were situated not immediately on the sea but several miles away from it. The example of Cnossos, the Cretan center of the Mediterranean world hundreds of years before either of them had been founded, may have acted as a warning of that dreadful thing that may happen when one is forever exposed to a surprise attack by pirates.Athens, however, was more conveniently near to the sea than Rome.A short time after he had landed in the Piraeus, then as now the harbor of Athens, the Greek sailor could be with his family.The Roman merchant needed three days for the trip.That was a little too long.He lost the habit of going back to his home city, settled down in the port at the mouth of the Tiber, and Rome gradually lost that intimate touch with the high seas which is of such tremendous benefit to all nations aspiring to world domination.

But gradually these mesa people, these inhabitants of the“top city”（for that is what acropolis meant）moved into the plain, built houses around the foot of their hill, surrounded them with walls, finally connected these fortifications and those of the Piraeus and settled down to a glorious life of trade and robbery which ere long made their impregnable fortress the richest metropolis of theentire Mediterranean Sea. Then their Acropolis was given up as a place of abode and became a shrine—a shrine which lifted its white marble temples proudly against the violet-tinted sky of Attica—a shrine which even today, when an explosion in a Turkish powder-magazine has destroyed some of its more important buildings（during the siege of Athens in 1645），remains unique and sublime among those show-places where the genius of man is revealed in its highest from of perfection.

When Greece regained her liberty in 1829，Athens had dwindled down to a mere village of 2000 inhabitants. In 1870 it had a population of 45，000.Today it has 700，000，a growth that is only paralleled by some of our own western cities.If the Greeks had not gambled with fate immediately after the Great War and had not foolishly thrown away all those immensely valuable possessions they had acquired in Asia Minor, Athens today would be the center of a mighty Aegean power.But all that may still happen in the near future.The mills of the Gods grind slowly but they continue day and night.And the city called after the shrewdest and wisest daughter of Zeus, born out of her father's brain, has shown itself to have a tremendous power of recuperation.

This brings us to the last and most distant part of the great Greek peninsula and there, alas, our confident and prophetic words of hope are of no further avail. The curse that rested upon Pelops on account of his father's great wickedness has never been lifted from the land upon which that unfortunate prince bestowed his name.Here, hidden from the sea by mighty mountain-ranges, lay the idyllic land of Arcadia, praised by all poets as the home of simple but honest and lovable shepherds and shepherdesses.Poets are apt to wax most enthusiastic about that of which they knew least.For the Arcadians were not more honest than the rest of the Greeks.If they did not practice the shabby tricks of their more sophisticated fellow-Hellenes, it was not because they disapproved of them.It was simply because they had never heard of them.It is true they did not steal, but there was nothing worth the taking in a country of dates and goats.They did not lie, but their hamlets were so small that everybody knew everything about everybody anyway.And if theykept away from the refined and decadent luxuries of those Gods worshipped in Eleusis and other Athenian centers of mysteries, they had a deity of their own, the great God Pan, who could give cards and spades to all the other Olympians when it came to coarse jokes and the low wit of barn-yard yokels.

It is true, then as now the Arcadians could fight, but it did them little good, for like most peasants they loathed discipline and could never agree who would be their commander-in-chief.

Southward of mountainous Arcadia stretched the plain of Laconia, a fertile plain, infinitely more fertile than the valleys of Attica, but sterile as to independence of thought and barren of all ideas that stretched beyond the mere necessities of life. In this plain the most curious city of antiquity was situated.Its name was Sparta and it stood for everything the northern Greeks held in abhorrence.Athens said“yea”unto life and Sparta said“nay”.Athens believed in inspired brilliancy, while Sparta worked towards efficiency and service.Athens proudly preached the divine right of her exceptional individuals.Sparta reduced all men to the dreary monotony of the mediocre.Athens opened its doors wide to foreigners.Sparta kept them out of the country or murdered them.The Athenians were born traders, but no Spartan was allowed to soil his hands with business.If we are to judge by the final success of these two policies, the town of Sparta did not do so well.The spirit of Athens has penetrated the whole world.The spirit of Sparta has gone the way of the city that gave it birth—it has disappeared.

You will find a place called Sparta on the modern maps of Greece. It is a village composed of small scale farmers and humble keepers of silk-worms.It was built in 1839 on the spot where ancient Sparta was supposed to have stood.English enthusiasm provided the money, a German architect drew the plans.But no one wanted to go and live there.Today after almost a century of effort, it has 4000 inhabitants.The old curse of Pelops！A curse that makes itself felt even more distinctly in another part of the peninsula—a curse that comes to full fruition in the prehistoric fortress of Mycenae.

The ruins of Mycenae are not far away from Nauplia the best-knownharbor of the Peloponnesus, situated on the gulf of that name. The town was destroyed five centuries before the birth of Christ.But to us people of the modern world it is of more direct importance than even Athens or Rome.For it was here that long before the beginning of written history, civilization for the first time touched the shores of savage Europe.

In order to understand how this came about, look at the three half-submerged ridges of the great Balkan hand that reaches from Europe to Asia. These fingers are composed of islands.Those islands nowadays belong to Greece except for a few in the eastern part of the Aegean which Italy has occupied and continues to occupy for the reason that no other nation wants to go to war on account of a few worthless rocks in a distant sea.For convenience'sake we divide those islands into two groups, the Cyclades near the Grecian coast and the Sporades near the coast of Asia Minor.Those islands, as St.Paul already knew, are within short sailing distance of each other.And they formed the bridge across which the civilization of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria moved westward until it reached the shores of Europe.Meanwhile that civilization, under the influence of those early immigrants of Asiatic origin who had settled down on the Aegean islands, had already been very distinctly“easternized”and it was in that form that finally it reached Mycenae which should have become what Athens afterwards became, the center of the classical Greek world.

Why didn't this happen？We do not know. No more than we know why Marseilles, the logical successor to Athens as the dominating power of the Mediterranean, should have been forced to surrender that honor to a very modern and very up start village called Rome.The short-lived glory of Mycenae and its abrupt decline will ever remain a mystery.

But, you will object, all that is history and this is supposed to be a book on geography. But in Greece, as in many ancient lands, history and geography have become so interwoven that the two cannot be discussed separately.And from a modern point of view there are only a few geographical items really worth mentioning.

The isthmus of Corinth has been pierced by a canal about three miles long but too shallow and too narrow for large vessels. Greece, as a result of a series of wars with Turkey（alone and together with Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro），almost doubled its territory, then lost one-half of all those new acquisitions because in her dreams of grandeur she underestimated the fighting qualities of the Turks.The Greeks today, as in ancient times, take readily to the sea, and the blue and white flag of the republic（the ancient Bavarian colors imported by the first king of the country after it had regained its independence in 1829）is to be seen in every part of the Mediterranean.Also occasionally in the North Sea and the Baltic, where such Grecian vessels, unlike the Grecian urn of Keats, are famous for their slovenliness and dirt.And for the rest, there are the figs and the olives and currants that are exported to all countries that care for such delicacies.

Will Greece ever return to her ancient glories as so many of her people hope and fervently expect？Perhaps.

But a nation overrun in turn by Macedonians, by Romans, by Goths and Vandals and Herulians and Slavs, conquered and turned into a colony by Normans, Byzantines, Venetians and the unspeakable riff-raff of the Crusades, then almost completely depopulated and repopulated by Albanians, forced to live under Turkish domination for almost four entire centuries and used as a base of supply and a battlefield by the forces of the Allies in the Great War—such a nation has suffered certain hardships from which it will find it extremely difficult to recuperate. As long as there is life, there is hope.But it is a mighty slender one.9.意大利，它的地理情况使它一旦时机成熟就能充当海上霸主或陆上霸主的角色/Italy, the Country Which due to Its Geographical Situation Could Play the Role of a Sea-Power or a Land-Power, as the Occasion Demanded导读

意大利是一个巨大山脉群的遗留物。2000万年前的火山爆发，赐予了它优越的气候条件。自然地理给予了意大利得天独厚的条件——作为北欧一个岛屿，那里三面临海。

莱茵河和罗纳河支流小溪与其主流近似直角，成为出入波河平原的捷径。这样的地理条件使得意大利既能成为航海国，统治地中海，又能发展内陆政权，征服欧洲。

历史上，意大利曾频繁遭受火山的袭击，因此，其地表被很厚的凝灰岩覆盖。而亚平宁山脉沿着半岛俯冲而下，将之分为两半。山脉由石灰石构成，很容易滑动。为了躲避滑坡，人们在高山上建立起不计其数的城镇。

但意大利比希腊拥有更光明的前途。1870年，意大利独立后就力争将自己的国家带入正轨。他们把波河河谷作为自己的食物储蓄库。这样，整个半岛上的人民就不会挨饿。著名的比萨斜塔

北部所有湖泊都是冰河湖，那里是使用便利的水库。那里的居民早就领会并开始运用这种天然优势——将数百条注入波河的细流用河渠连接起来，并修筑了许多堤坝和排水道。那里适宜稻谷生长，不仅可以提供食物，也能提供衣服。

意大利有两个非常浪漫的城市——威尼斯和拉文纳。威尼斯有157条运河，充当着街道。内陆城市拉文纳外围被6英里的浊流包围，与亚得利亚海隔开。北部的意大利没有煤，但水力资源丰富。那里有着著名的平民企业。西面是利古里亚的阿尔卑斯山，将波河平原与地中海分开。

利古里亚的阿尔卑斯山南坡，适于长途旅行。那里有最昂贵的宾馆，成为欧洲的豪华游乐场之一。首脑城市是热那亚，大理石宫殿将其装点得富丽堂皇。靠近亚诺河，河口处有两个城市：比萨和内窝那。内窝那以南，便进入台伯河平原。与亚诺河相比，台伯河平原更贫瘠，是疾病的发源地。

但是，我不明白为什么当时最重要的城市会建立在这样疾病滋生的地方。也许是某种政治上的考虑，也许是机遇，也许是贪欲，但这两者却总是联系在一起，无法分开。

那不勒斯处于临海海湾的前部，享有一切可能的天然优势，却被处于一条无足轻重的小河边的一个死巷里的罗马统治着。尽管如此，它还是成为了整个欧洲最为拥挤的城市。那不勒斯以南便是名为卡拉布里亚的省份。墨西拿海峡将卡拉布里亚和西西里岛隔开。西西里有着得天独厚的地理位置，使其成为世界的天然中心。那里有令人愉快的气候，人口密集，土地肥沃，环境安逸。这种安逸某种程度上造成了西西里人的安于现状，在两千年的历史中可以容忍外国对它的压迫。

马耳他岛虽然并不隶属于意大利，但它是西西里岛的水上郊区，当时欧洲到亚洲的贸易路线要经过苏伊士运河，而这里成了要道。世界大战中，伊士特里亚半岛被分给了意大利人，作为其背叛盟友的回报。萨丁岛在亚平宁史前山脉的最远端，地位举足轻重；但离陆地太远，人烟稀少。

现代意大利王国碰巧由一个以一座岛屿命名的王国发展而来，而在这个岛屿王国，成千上万人中也见不到一个意大利人。

GEOLOGICALLY speaking, Italy is a ruin—all that is left of a vast mountain complex which formed a square like modern Spain but which withered away（as even the hardest rock will do in the course of a few million years）and finally disappeared beneath the waters of the Mediterranean. Only the easternmost part of that ancient mountain-range is visible today, the Apennines, which reach from the valley of the Po to Calabria in the toe of the boot.威尼斯的象征（油画维托雷·卡尔帕乔）

Corsica, Elba and Sardinia are visible remnants of that high prehistoric plateau. Sicily was of course another part of it.Here and there in the Tyrrhenian Sea small islands betray the presence of ancient pinnacles.It must have been a terrific tragedy when all that land was captured by the sea.But as it happened some 20，000，000 years ago, when the earth suffered from the last of its great volcanic epidemics, there was no one present to tell the tale.And in the end it proved to be of enormous benefit to those who afterwards were to occupy the Apennine peninsula, for it gave them a country enjoying such sublime natural advantages of climate, soil and geographical location that it seemed almost predestined to become the dominating power of antiquity and one of the most important factors of the development and dissemination of art and knowledge.

Greece was the hand that reached out to Asia, caught hold of the ancient civilization of the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates, and re-exported this article to the rest of Europe. But all that time the Greeks themselves remained something apart from the continent upon which they bestowed their manifold blessing.Their country might just as well have been an island.The fact that it was a peninsula did not do it any good, for rows and rows of mountains, indeed, the whole of the Balkan range, cut it off from the rest of European humanity.

Italy, on the other hand, enjoyed the advantages of being both a sort of island, surrounded on three sides by the sea, while at the same time being very distinctly a part of the land-mass of northern Europe. We often overlook that fact and talk of Spain and Greece and Italy as if they more or less resembled each other.Spain and Greece had much in common.The Pyrenees and the Balkan mountainranges were impassable barriers between north and south.But the great plain of the Po was a salient that reached well up into the heart ofEurope.The northernmost cities of Italy enjoy a higher latitude than Geneva or Lyons.Even Milan and Venice are of a higher latitude than Bordeaux and Grenoble, while Florence, which we unconsciously associate with the very heart of Italy, is almost on a line with Marseilles.

And furthermore, the Alps, although much higher than the Pyrenees and the mountains of the Balkans, had been formed in such a way as to offer comparatively easy access from south to north. The Rhine and the Rhône, running parallel with the northern frontier of Italy, divided the Alps into two halves；and therefore the valleys of the little brooks and streams running into the Rhine and Rhône, making an angle of ninety degrees with the mother river, offered convenient short-cuts into the plain of the Po—as Hannibal, with a whole circus of elephants, was the first to prove to the great detriment of the unsuspecting Romans.

Italy therefore was able to play a dual role, that of a maritime nation, dominating the Mediterranean, and that of a continental power, conquering and exploiting the rest of Europe.

When the Mediterranean ceased to be a world sea and the discovery of America made the Atlantic Ocean the center of commerce and civilization, Italy lost its former advantages. Without coal and iron she could not hope to compete with the industrial countries of the west.But for almost twelve hundred years, from the founding of Rome in 753 B.C.till the fourth century of our era, Italy dominated and administered every part of Europe south of the Elbe and the Danube.

Unto the wild Germanic tribes that had just arrived from Asia and were now quarreling violently for the possession of this desirable“far west”Italy gave their first conception of law and order and the superior advantages of a semi-civilized life over the uncertainties and filth of a merely nomadic existence. Of course she enriched herself incredibly at the expense of every one else.But while taking a heavy toll of taxes, she delivered certain“goods”that were to shape the destinies of all those different regions for all times to come.And even today, the more than casual observer, visiting Paris or Bucharest, Madrid or Treves, will at once be struck by a certain similarity of look and outlook on the part of the inhabitants.He will be surprised that he can read the signs on the shops, no matter whether they are in French or Spanish or Roumanian or Portuguese.And then he will realize：“I am in an old Roman colony here.All this land once upon a time belonged to Italy just as the Philippines today belong to us.The first houses were built by Italian architects, the first streets were laid out by Italian generals, the first traffic and commercial regulations were written in the tongue of central Italy”，and he will begin to appreciate what tremendous natural advantages were enjoyed by this country that was at once an island and part of the mainland.威尼斯大运河与塞鹿特教堂的入口（油画米谢勒·马利也斯基）

At the same time the fortunate geological accident which had enabled Italy to conquer the whole of the known world carried with it certain very decided drawbacks. A country born out of volcanic upheavals was forever threatened to be killed by the very mother that had given it birth.For Italy is not only the classical land of moonlit ruins, orange trees, mandolin concerts and picturesque peasants.It is also the classical land of volcanic eruptions.

Every Italian who reaches the normal threescore and ten（easy in a country where laughter and gracious manners seem to come as natural as grouchy grins and boorishness do in other less favored parts of the world）is sure to have been an active participant in at least one major earthquake and a couple of minor ones before he is reverently carried to the family lot in the Campo Santo. The seismograph（most reliable of instruments I wish all our instruments were as painstakingly true）reported 300 quakes for the period of 1905-1907 alone.The next year，1908，Messina was completely destroyed.If you want a few vital statistics（and mere figures are often infinitely more eloquent than pages of print）here is the record for the island of Ischia, situated just opposite Capri.

That island alone suffered from earthquakes in 1228，1302，1762，1796，1805，1812，1827，1828，1834，1841，1851，1852，1863，1864，1867，1874，1875，1880，1881，1883，etc.，etc.

As a result of these millions of years of violent eruptions, enormous tracts of Italian land got gradually covered with thick layers of tufa or tuff, a soft sortof rock composed of volcanic ash, thrown up by craters when in a state of violent eruption. These layers of tufa are very porous and they have a very decided influence upon the landscape of the entire peninsula.Some of those tufa fields cover areas of not less than 4000 square miles and the classical seven hills of Rome were really nothing but heaps of hardened volcanic ash.

But there are other geological developments, also the result of prehistoric upheavals, which make the soil of Italy so treacherous. The Apennines, which run the entire length of the peninsula, dividing it nearly into halves, are for a great part composed of limestone, a softish substance which lies on top of the older and harder rock formations.This limestone is apt to slide.The ancient Italians were so thoroughly familiar with this fact that even in the absence of volcanic upheavals they used to inspect the boundary lines of every large country estate once in twenty years to see whether the stone marks, indicating where one man's property ended and another man's began, were still in their correct position.And the modern Italians are made to realize this“sliding process”of their soil（and in a very costly and painful way）every time a railroad is pushed out of shape or a road is squashed to pieces or another village is rolled down the embankment of a lovely green mountain.

When you visit Italy you will be surprised at the large number of towns perched on the tops of high hills. The usual explanation is that the original inhabitants fled to those eagles'nests for safety's sake.That, however, was only a secondary consideration.When they moved to those uncomfortable pinnacles, so far removed from the wells of the valley and the main routes of communication, they did so primarily to avoid the dangers of sliding to death.Near the top of the mountains the base rocks of the ancient geological structure usually came to the surface and offered future residents a permanent place of abode.The sides of the hills, covered with soapy limestone, were as dependable as quicksand.Hence those picturesque villages that look so marvellous from a distance and are so incredibly uncomfortable once one is inside.

And this brings us to a consideration of modern Italy. For Italy, unlike Greece, does not merely have its future behind it.It works intelligently and courageously towards a new goal, and if it keeps long hours, it does so to undo the damage of a thousand years of neglect and once more regain its ancient and honorable status among the ranking nations of the earth.古罗马艺术品陈列室（油画帕尼尼）

In the year 1870 Italy once more became a united nation and as soon as the struggle for independence was over and the foreign rulers had been driven back across the Alps（where they belonged）the Italians started upon the gigantic and well nigh hopeless task of putting their long-neglected house in order.

First of all they turned their attention to the valley of the Po—the larder from which the whole peninsula could be conveniently fed. The Po is not a very long river as rivers go.As a matter of fact, if you will look at the picture of the comparative length of rivers, you will notice that the Volga is the only European river that is a fit candidate for such honors.The Po, which keeps close to 45°N.Lat.，is only 420 miles long but its basin area, the territory from which it draws its tributaries and which therefore comes under its direct influence, is 27，000 square miles.That is not as much as several other rivers have, but the Po has some other qualities which make it unique.

It is navigable for fully five-sixths of its entire length and it is one of the fastest delta-builders of the world. Every year it adds almost three-quarters of a square mile to its delta and pushes it 200 feet further outward.If it continues to do this for another ten centuries, it will have reached the opposite coast of the Istrian peninsula and Venice will be situated on a lake, separated from the rest of the Adriatic by a dam seven miles wide.

Part of this vast amount of sediment which the Po carries to the sea has of course sunk to the bottom of the river and has filled it up with a layer of solid substance several feet thick. In order to keep the ever-rising river from flooding the surrounding landscape, the people living along its banks had to build dikes.They began to do this in Roman times.They are still doing it.As a result, the surface of the Po is much higher than the plain through which it flows.In several villages the dikes are thirty feet high and the river runs at the same height as the roofs of the houses.

But the Po region is famous for something else. Once upon a time, and notso very, long ago, geologically speaking, the entire northern plain of Italy was part of the Adriatic Sea.Those lovely Alpine gorges which are now so popular with the summer tourists were narrow bays, like the fjords, the submerged valleys of the modern Norwegian mountains.These valleys were the outlet for the water that descended from the glaciers which then covered the greater part of Europe and of course a great deal more of the Alps than they do today.Glaciers get thickly covered with stones that roll down on them from the mountain slopes between which they pass on their way downwards.Such fringes of rocks are called moraines.When two glaciers meet, two moraines are bound to combine into a moraine double as high as the original ones, which is then called a“median moraine”，and when the glacier finally melts, it drops this rocky ballast, which is called the“terminal moraine”.

These terminal moraines are a sort of geological beaver-dam, for they close the uppermost part of the valley off from the lower. As long as the glacier period lasts, there will be enough water to make the terminal moraines a negligible hindrance for the water on its downward course.But gradually, as the glaciers disappear and there is less and less water, the terminal moraine rises higher than the water and we get a lake.

All the north Italian lakes, the Lago Maggiore, the Lago di Como and the Lago di Garda, are moraine lakes. When man appeared upon the scene and began his works of irrigation, those moraine lakes acted as handy reservoirs.For in the spring, when the snow began to melt, they caught the surplus water which, if it had descended upon the valley in one solid body, would have caused the most destructive inundations.The Lago di Garda can rise twelve feet and the Lago Maggiore as much as fifteen feet and still take care of the extra water.A simple system of locks will then do the rest and tap those lakes according to the necessities of the day.

At a very early date the inhabitants of the great Po plain began to make use of this fortunate circumstance. They connected with canals the hundreds of little streams that feed the Po.They built dams and dikes and today thousands of cubic feet of water pass through these canals every few minutes.

It was an ideal region for the growing of rice. In the year 1468 the first rice plants were introduced by a Pisa merchant and today the rice-terraces are a common sight of the central plain of the Po.Other crops,

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