The cosmography of every primitive people, their first crude effort in the science of the universe, bears the impress of their habitat.

The Eskimo's hell is a place of darkness, storm and intense cold;[69] the Jew's is a place of eternal fire.

Buddha, born in the steaming Himalayan piedmont, fighting the lassitude induced by heat and humidity, pictured his heaven as Nirvana, the cessation of all activity and individual life.
[Sidenote: Indirect effect upon language] Intellectual effects of environment may appear in the enrichment of a language in one direction to a rare nicety of expression; but this may be combined with a meager vocabulary in all other directions.

The greatest cattle-breeders among the native Africans, such as the Hereros of western Damaraland and the Dinkas of the upper White Nile, have an amazing choice of words for all colors describing their animals--brown, dun, red, white, dapple, and so on in every gradation of shade and hue.
The Samoyedes of northern Russia have eleven or twelve terms to designate the various grays and browns of their reindeer, despite their otherwise low cultural development.[70] The speech of nomads has an abundance of expressions for cattle in every relation of life.

It includes different words for breeding, pregnancy, death, and slaughtering in relation to every different kind of domestic animal.