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In a recent study, David Cressy examines two central questions concerning English immigration to New England in the 1630s: what kinds of people immigrated and why? Using contemporary literary evidence, shipping lists, and customs records, Cressy finds that most adult immigrants were skilled in farming or crafts, were literate, and were organized in families. Each of these characteristics sharply distinguishes the 21,000 people who left for New England in the 1630s from most of the approximately 377,000 English people who had immigrated to America by 1700. With respect to their reasons for immigrating, Cressy does not deny the frequently noted fact that some of the immigrants of the 1630s, most notably the organizers and clergy, advanced religious explanations for departure, but he finds that such explanations usually assumed primacy only in retrospect. When he moves beyond the principal actors, he finds that religious explanations were less frequently offered, and he concludes that most people immigrated because they were recruited by promises of material improvement.
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In the early twentieth century, Clements proposed an ecological theory that, while challenged by scientists from its inception, has continued to influence popular conceptions of nature. Clements argued that plants form communities of interdependent species and that these communities function as 'superorganisms' that develop over time in a predictable succession of stages to a 'climax' formation. Thus forests, for example, if undisturbed by humans, will evolve toward a stable community of old-growth trees. However, many botanists immediately pointed out that these supposed superorganisms have no clear edges: while pine forests and hardwood forests might appear to constitute two distinct superorganisms, one of them can blend imperceptibly into the other. Gleason pointed out in 1927 that what Clements called succession often proceeds in both directions simultaneously: prairie gives way to pinewoods in one spot while pines give way to prairie in another. Gleason also emphasized the role that chance disturbance, such as fire or variations in rainfall, plays in determining the shape of the landscape.
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Whether the languages of the ancient American peoples were used for expressing abstract universal concepts can be clearly answered in the case of Nahuatl. Nahuatl, like Greek and German, is a language that allows the formation of extensive compounds.By the combination of radicals or semantic elements, single compound words can express complex conceptual relations, often of an abstract universal character. The tlamatinime (those who know) were able to use this rich stock of abstract terms to express the nuances of their thought. They also availed themselves of other forms of expression with metaphorical meaning, some probably original, some derived from Toltec coinages. Of these forms, the most characteristic in Nahuatl is the juxtaposition of two words that, because they are synonyms, associated terms, or even contraries, complement each other to evoke one single idea. Used metaphorically, the juxtaposed terms connote specific or essential traits of the being they refer to, introducing a mode of poetry as an almost habitual form of expression.
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