s in Siberia, an admirable summer climate
like that of the Canadian Northwest.[1450]

[Sidenote: The cradle of civilization.]

The North Temperate Zone is preeminently the culture zone of the earth.
It is the seat of the most important, most steadily progressive
civilizations, and the source of all the cultural stimuli which have
given an upward start to civilization in other zones during the past
three centuries. It contains the Mediterranean basin, which was the
pulsing heart of ancient history, and all the modern historically
important regions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The temperate
belt of the southern hemisphere also is following its lead, since
European civilization has been transplanted to other parts of the world.
This is the zone which least suffers from the drawbacks of climatic
monotony or extremes, and best combines, especially in the northern
hemisphere, the wide range of annual and seasonal variety so favorable
to economic and cultural development, with the incalculable advantage of
large land area.

Man grew in the temperate zone, was born in the Tropics. There, in his
primitive, pre-civilized state, he lived in a moist, warm, uniform
climate which supplied abundantly his simple wants, put no strain upon
his feeble intellect and will. That first crude human product of
Nature's Pliocene workshop turned out in the steaming lowland of Java,
and now known to us as the _Pithecanthropus erectus_, found about him
the climatic conditions generally conceded to have been necessary for
man in his helpless, futile infancy. Where man has remained in the
Tropics, with few exceptions he has suffered arrested development. His
nursery has kept him a child. Though his initial progress depended upon
the gifts which Nature put into his hands, his later evolution depended
far more upon the powers which she developed within him. These have no
limit, so far as our experience shows; but their growth is painful,
reluctant. Therefore they develop only where Nature subjects man to
compulsion, forces him to earn his daily bread, and thereby something
more than bread. This compulsion is found in less luxurious but more
salutary geographic conditions than the Tropics afford, in an
environment that exacts a tribute of labor and invention in return for
the boon of life, but offers a reward certain and generous enough to
insure the accumulation of wealth which marks the beginning of
civilization.[1451]

Most of the ancie