The Introductory Remark traces the semasiology and use of the word milieu and discusses its English and German equivalents “environment” and “Umwelt.”

An historical sketch of the milieu idea is then taken up from the very beginnings to the nineteenth century. The earlier notions of environmental influence are general and undifferentiated.

The Hebrew Prophets see the hand of Providence in the harmony of national fate with the configuration of the globe. Hippocrates dwells upon the regularity of climatic effect on man. Aristotle notes the action of physical environment on government and national character. Eratosthenes, Strabo, and other Greek thinkers, relate man causally to surrounding nature. Villani says that the fine air of Arezzo produces great minds. Ibn Khaldun explains, especially Arabic history, by the circumambient physical and social medium. Michelangelo credits Arezzo’s fine air with his mentality. Man is subject to the “skyey influences” hourly (Shakespeare).

Jean Bodin plants the study of environment in French soil so firmly and so successfully that it has since become, in a very real sense, indigenous to France and that Bertillon could justly claim it to be a study “trÈs-franÇaise,” a claim which is true to this very day. Bodin’s second contribution is that he undertook, for the first time in the modern period (on the basis of sixteenth century knowledge and experience), a scientific and detailed examination, far-reaching and extensive in scope, of the manifold influences of climatic and geographical conditions upon States, laws, national character, religion, language, temperament, talents and aptitudes,—in brief, upon man’s mind, manners, and morals.

The study of milieu thus inaugurated in France by Bodin is set up as a French tradition by Lenglet du Fresnoy, Montesquieu, Turgot, Cuvier, and others,^[294] and has been continued by French writers to our day.

A number of philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries take up this idea. The doctrine of environment spreads to England and Germany.

In Germany, Herder becomes the fulcrum of all previous thought (Hebrew, Greek, French, English, and German) on this theory. Herder, in turn, in addition to his other and principal contributions to the theory, affects it by giving a quickened impetus not only to the contemporary development thereof, but also to the later course of that development. Goethe reflects some of Herder’s conceptions. Wolf, Niebuhr, the German romanticists—August Wilhelm Schlegel in especial—and Hegel apply Herder’s idea to history and continue it therein. Hegel combats the notion that climate can be the be-all and end-all of historical explanation; he implies that climate was held to be a vera causa.

The theory of social environment evolves, particularly since Ibn Khaldun, parallel with that of the physical milieu.

The nineteenth century brings differentiation carried out in human geography including history, in biology, in jurisprudence and economics, in anthropology, in sociology, in literature, and latterly in physics. These disciplines determine our divisions for discussions shortly to follow the present one.

The major portion of this study is then given over to following the milieu idea in some of the more important French, English, and German writers of the past century on what for want of a better name has been called anthropo-geography inclusive of certain aspects of history.

On the whole, their method has been the comparative method. Principles laid down a priori would be illustrated by typical cases selected mostly from the past. Or, the process would be reversed to an a posteriori reasoning: history restudied to find out its possible connections with the environment. Again: some would pick out a phase of the encompassing medium and follow out its effects in a particular country, while others would try to arrive at a more general conclusion.

With reference to climate in particular, the statistical method was employed by QuÉtelet, Bertillon, Leffingwell, Ferri, Holzendorf, Guerry, Curcio, Lombroso, and others, who established a parallelism, or coincidence, between certain climatic features and the criminal conduct of man.

Delimited aspects of environment, relating again more to climate than any other phase of the milieu, were made the objects of observational or experimentally observational studies by Dexter, Brunhes, and Hellpach, the last two giving the most recent comprehensive summaries of our knowledge in this field. And they are among the best we have.

The next part of this study will continue the survey of the history of this theory in the above mentioned sciences as well as in literature.