Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1872-08-23

Climate and Physique.
(From the London SPECTATOR
| The notion that man fiourishcs best in tenn
perae cline survives all evidence to the con-
trary and will he repeated with perfect GOODNESS
by the man who has lust itiforrfied You flat the
two most perfect of earthly climates, the Tas
manian, which is the English climate etherial-
lied, and the Californian, which is the Greek eli
mate cooled, produce the two feebIest races OF
mankind. The native Tasmanian and the Digger
Indian are with the Feddah the lowest specimens
of humanity hitherto observed. go far as the
very imperfect evidence attaiuable will prove,
the physical qualities, strength, size, courage,
and perhaps induStry-we doubt if that is a
physical quality, but it is counted as one-are
independent of climate altogether, and specially
independent of the thermometer. The biggest
and strongest race of earth, the Nubian OF the
| Upper Nile, fourishes in heat which almost
boiled Verne, the traveller, who has most care
| fully observed his wonderful muscular develop
ment, and can live aid grow fat in stoke rooms
| from which the most powerful Englisfmen are
| carried out faintirg and half dead Kaiser
! Williams Pomeranians are scarcely the equals
=; of these men in physique, and are not when
they choose more steadily industrious. humal
of COnstantinnple or Cairo would carry q rail-
way porter on his shoulder aud all his baggage
besides, and Bengalee boatman would row
London waterman, as far as endurance is
concerned, into an apOplectic fit. The
Bengalee is weak and the Peguan is
not brave, but tie Malay, born under
precisely the same conditions, The very
conditions to which Macanlay attributed the eff
feminsney of the Bengalees, has the courage of
a ferret, the aGtitltg of a monkey, and the en-.
durance of thoroughbred horse. Some day or
other, when we reign in Cairo, Englishmen will
officer an army of Arabs, men bred in desert
where the sun seems to hate human beings and
pursue them with Il kind of conscious pitifu-
ness and then Asia will know how once more
a.. IN no
France and Spain SO terrible an enemy. Few
huniar beings are SO powerful as the Parsees
whose wrestlers defeat picked men from the
British army, aud they have dwelt for ages in a
climate to which that of Italy is cold, and for
two centuries in western India; and none are SO
industrious as the Chinese Of the soutm, the
men of those Steamiug stipGtheatea aeltas where
the earth being water, the men, ON the popular
theory, shCald he women. Out of the "softy
enervating climate, as We EH..hernerS deem il,
Of central Italy came the Sternest, bravesi, and
most efficient human being that ever walked
the world, the fighting Roman patrician, who,
after tlOHsaUd years of heat, and luxury, and
stated vouptuousness, was still the most fermid-
able officer with whom an enemy could come in
contact, and he was outdone in courage by the
men who swarrhed up from the blazing slopes of
Palestine and the fierce Eeat OF ldnWea to defend
the holy city. The Scotch and the Swedcs are
confeSsedly manly people, able to toll, and to
maulierj or Drawer. or more enduring than
the planters bred in those swelterlno
rice swampS of South Carolina, dr tile hot "bar
rens' of Georgia, or the hotter lagoOnS and
morasses and flooded iungles of louisiana
where, upon all accepted conditions, men ought
to degenerate into towards. The DelawareS
bred in eItiperate Cliutatej were not Drawer
than the SemnOes of Florida, or as brave as
their far-away klnsfolk, the Caribs of Panama !;
and the negro transported out of the tropics
distinctly loses nerve. We think that heat de-
mOraliSes; but when Spain ANTICIPATED Britain
and conquered and c0ldnited continent, when
three hundred Spanish ruflans led by a brutal
pig-loOber trampled down q Semi-civilized en-
pire with millions of inhabitants, Spain was as
hot as it is now. We speak of the exceptional
prolifcneSs of the AugloSaxon, who is now
sending an army of 100, 900 men a year to people
America and the southern continent, and never
ieelslthe loss; but who peopled India and South
ern China and the southern shore of the Medit-
erranean, and Spanish America, except races
who must have lived for ages finder the sun? 1t
was not under hard gray weather that the
Temple of the Sun rose in Baalbec, or the
columns of Luxor, or the coliseum, monuments
all of them of human industry as well as of
human skill and dOmineering energy. Grant
that the work was done by slaves il is not by
the feeble that slaves are held in slavery
1t is where nature is harsh, we are told, that
man rises by inccsSant endeavor to his highest
than to the modern Colonnas, while it was
great deal harder to the Picts, who did nothing
than to the Lothian farmers, who do so very
much. That some law cOrrelating progress, or
what we call progress, with material conditions
exists, is possible or probable, but it is not dis
covered yet, and when discovered, will probably
be found an exceedingly weak one the true
source of difference being moral or Intellectual
or most probable of all, dependent on that facul-
ty OF which we know as yet so extremely little,
the faculty which separates man by an impassi-
BILE line from every other creature, the faculty of
intellectual accumulation. If we could once be
certain that there are races who possess this in
infniteSima quantity, or in limited quantity, or
in excessively different degrees, we should
know why the Chinese stop, and why the leu
tonic mind, thckcst and slowest of all the
greater minds, is mastering the world Civii-
cation grew first, and probably lasted longest,
in hot, steamy, swampy, semi-tropical valley |;
and most of the savage races, such as the Red
Indians, the Brtons, and the Swiss lake dwell
lers, have dwelt for countless ages under the
climatic conditions which the Teuton, in his
extreme surprise to find himself at the top of
the world, now quotes as those which favor pro-
gressiye civilization.