Abstract
IN his Fraser Lecture under this title (Cambridge: At the University Press. Pp. 52. 2s. net) Sir John Myres deals with a culture which developed in “an exceptional human habitat”. He analyses first the permanent features of the mode of life of the ordinary dwellers in this Mediterranean area. Here is a peasantry closely adapting itself to the possibilities which the environment offered, and a wider community drawing from outside, since “in a region so physically uniform it was necessary to go far for anything unusual”. Hence the significance of the sea, and with it sea-power shown legitimately in commerce, colonization, and pilgrimage, and otherwise in piracy. Hence, too, the gulf between the city, product of this sea-life, and the peasantry, a gulf that “has become an enduring fact of Mediterranean life” ; and on all, immigrants have made their influence felt. Sometimes they have been “transformed by transit through the mountain zone”, sometimes they have disorganized life for a time, but only for a time, since “the primary economic groups persist or re-appear”. This summary analysis, to quote the author, “if not quite historical geography is offered as an essay in geographical history”. Many will derive pleasure and profit from what is thus offered.
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Mediterranean Culture. Nature 152, 534 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/152534b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/152534b0