The Personality of Mexico

HIS is an excursion into the oldest tradition of geography. For, whatever the problems of the day may be which claim the attention of the specialist and which result in more precise methods of inspection and more formal systems of comparison, there remains a form of geographic curiosity that is never contained by systems. It is the art of seeing how land and life have come to differ from one part of the earth to another. This quality of understanding has interested men almost from the beginning of human time and requires restatement and reexamination for each new generation. Many names have been given to the central and never completed theme of regional interpretation. For this paper a term is borrowed from Sir Cyril Fox's admirable study of the cultural backgrounds of the British Isles.' The designation of personality applied to a particular part of the earth involves the whole dynamic relation of life and land. It does not deal with land and life as separate things, but with a given land as lived in by a succession of peoples, who have appraised its resources for their time in terms of their capacities and needs, who have spread themselves through it as best suited their ends, and who have filled it with the works that expressed their particular way of life.