i. e._, the cardinal points, would be most
striking.

What is more: the re-appearance of the sun, after the long darkness of a
northern winter, must have established the idea of a fixed relationship
between certain positions of Ursa Major and the solstitial position of the
sun. It may indeed be said that the observation of the solstices and
equinoxes was forced upon the inhabitants of the north as nowhere else on
the globe and that it may perhaps be therefore designated as the
birthplace of primitive astronomy.

The origin of the idea of an all-pervading duality and the chains of
association which linked Light and the Sun to air and water, and to the
male element, whilst Darkness and the Nocturnal Heaven became connected
with earth, fire and woman, are clearly accounted for in the circumpolar
regions only, where the year divides itself into a period of light in
which independent and roaming out-door life was possible, and a period of
darkness during which family life, in underground fire-lit dwellings, was
compulsory. If fathomed, the mind of the Eskimo to-day may possibly reveal
the germs of identical associations of ideas, for it would seem as though
existence in the polar regions would infallibly stamp them indelibly upon
the consciousness of all living creatures, until they unconsciously
pervaded their entire being and even affected the structural organization
of the human brain.(135)

The tendency to believe that the human race must have spent its infancy
near the pole and received there an intellectual stamp, which could not
have been conveyed to it so clearly in any other latitude, is undoubtedly
encouraged by the opinion of various authorities, that "all forms of life
must have originated at the pole, this having been the first habitable
portion of our world." This view is exhaustively treated in William
Fairfield Warren's "Paradise Found, the cradle of the human race at the
North Pole" (Boston, 1885), to which I refer the reader and which contains
much valuable data which I would have incorporated in the present
investigation had I had earlier access to the volume. It would seem as
though Warren's conclusions were in perfect accord with the conclusions
arrived at by some leading palaeontologists, geologists and botanists,
concerning the distribution of life on the globe. These are conveniently
summarized in the article on "Distribution" in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, from which the following detached excerp