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
　　
　　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






装在盒子里的人类

现在充斥着战舰和武器的世界有更多优点。
　　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。
　　
　　
　　     T 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










平静的王国（油画  爱德华·希克斯）








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!
　　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







这就是我们生活的地球






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. 
　　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









长着朱鹭头的托特神（雕刻  埃及）







woe of everybody else means the weal and woe of ourselves!
　　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
　　
　　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。
　　
　　
　　
　　      EFORE 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 that will 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
　　
　　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










太阳系八大行星








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。
　　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。










哥白尼的宇宙体系








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。
　　本章介绍了一些背景，关于气象学、海洋学和天文学。
　　
　　
　　     ET 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 revolve around 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 which 
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                    Van Loon’s           Geography

                    Van Loon’s           Geography

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