Ellsworth Huntington Quotes

America forms the longest and straightest bone in the earth's skeleton.

The human organism inherits so delicate an adjustment to climate that, in spite of man's boasted ability to live anywhere, the strain of the frozen North eliminates the more nervous and active types of mind.

The Indians could not undertake any widespread cultivation of the plains not only because they lacked iron tools but also because they had no draft animals.

It will be a vast boon to mankind when we learn to prophesy the precise dates when cycles of various kinds will reach definite stages.

Except on their southern borders the great northern forests are not good as a permanent home for man.

Although farming of any sort was almost as impossible in the plains as in the dry regions of winter rains farther west, the abundance of buffaloes made life much easier in many respects.

The Negro, however, has been tested on an extensive scale.

Curiously enough man's body and his mind appear to differ in their climatic adaptations.

The buffalo is a surprisingly stupid animal.

America is the last great goal of these migrations.

The evidence points to central Asia as man's original home, for the general movement of human migrations has been outward from that region and not inward.

History in its broadest aspect is a record of man's migrations from one environment to another.

Year by year we are learning that in this restless, strenuous American life of ours vacations are essential.

Again and again, to be sure, on the way to America, and under many other circumstances, man has passed through the most adverse climates and has survived, but he has flourished and waxed strong only in certain zones.

It seems strange that almost no other traces of the strong vikings are found in America.

Nevertheless most of the evergreen forests of the north must always remain the home of wild animals and trappers, a backward region in which it is easy for a great fur company to maintain a practical monopoly.

No part of the world can be truly understood without a knowledge of its garment of vegetation, for this determines not only the nature of the animal inhabitants but also the occupations of the majority of human beings.

Although mountains may guide migrations, the plains are the regions where people dwell in greatest numbers.

The whole history of life is a record of cycles.

Man could not stay there forever. He was bound to spread to new regions, partly because of his innate migratory tendency and partly because of Nature's stern urgency.

The coast of British Columbia was one of the three chief centers of aboriginal America.

In fact, the history of North America has been perhaps more profoundly influenced by man's inheritance from his past homes than by the physical features of his present home.

Geologists are rapidly becoming convinced that the mammals spread from their central Asian point of origin largely because of great variations in climate.

With every throb of the climatic pulse which we have felt in Central Asia,, the centre of civilisation has moved this way and that. Each throb has sent pain and decay to the lands whose day was done, life and vigour to those whose day was yet to be.

Today, no less than in the past, the tetrahedral form of the earth and the relation of the tetrahedron to the poles and to the equator preserve the conditions that favor rapid evolution.

A journey of four hundred and thirty miles can be made in any part of the United States, but in Turkey it takes as many days.