Burlington weekly free press. [volume] (Burlington, Vt.) 1866-1928, 1872-10-25
From the London Spectator.
Climate and Physique.

you that the two most perfect Of earthly
climates, the Tasmanian, which is the Eng
/ lish climate etherialized, and the Californian.
| which is the Greek climate cooled. produce
| the two feeblest races of mankind. The na-
| tive rasmanian and the Digger Indian are
wit the Veddah the lowest specimens of
humanity hitherto observed. So far as the
very imperfect evidence attainable 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, hourishes in
heat which almost boiled Verne, the travel
Ter who has most carefully observed his Won
/ derful muscular Development and can live
and grow fat in stOke-roOms from which the
most powerful Englishmen are carried out
| faintino and half dead. Kaiser Williams
| Pomeranians are scarcely the equals of these
men in physique, and are not when they
choose more steadily industrious. 4 hui
NAL of Constantinople or Cairo would carry
railway porter on his shoulders and all his
luggage besides, and Bengalee boatman
would row a London waterman, as far as en-
| durance is concerned, into an apoplectic fit.
| The Bengalee is weak and the Pegaun is not
brave, hut the Malay, born under precisely
the same conditions, the very conditions to
which Macauay attributed the eheminacy
of the Bengalees, has the courage of a ferret,
the activity of q monkey, and the endurance
of a thoroughbred horse. Some day or
other, when we reign in Cairo, Englishmen
will officer an army of Arabs, men bred in a
desert where the sun seems to hate human
beings and pursue them with a kind of con
scious pitilessness, and then Asia viii know
once more why the Moor seemed 10 the mail
ed knights of France and Spain 50 terrible
an enemy Few human beings are so power
full as the ParseeS, whose wrestlers defeat
picked men from the British army, and they
have dwelt for ages in climate TO which
that of Italy is cold, and for two centuries in
Western India and none are 50 industrious
as the Chinese Of the South, the men Of
those steaming superheated Deltas where the
earth being water, the men. on the popular
theory, should be women. The Peruvian Is
n soft creature, but his climate is cooler than
that of the regions in Panama and Guiana,
where the bravest and fercest of aborigines,
the Carib, still maintains his hereditary free
dom. Out Of the - softly eneryating eli
mate. " a. we Northerns deem it, Of Central
Italy came the sternest, bravest, and most
efficient human being that ever walked the
world, the fighting Roman patrician, who,
after n thousand years Of heat, and luxury,
and sated voluptousness, was still the most
formidable officer with whom an enemy could
come IN contact and he was outdone in
courage by the men who swarmed up irOw
the blazing slopes of Palestine and the fierce
heat Of Idumea TO defend the Holy City.
The Scotch and the Swedes are confessedly
manly people, able to toll, and to battle, and
to endure but they are not manlier, or
brayer, or more enduring than the planters
bred in those sweitering rice swamps of South
Carolina, or the hot - barrens' of Georgia,
or the hotter lqgo0nS and morasses and Hood
ed jungles of Louisiana, where upon all ac-
cepted conditions men ought TO degenerate
into towards. The Delawares, bred in
temperate climate, We're not brayer than the
Semin0les of Florida, or so brave a. their far
away kinsfolk the Caribs Of Panama and
the Negro transported out of the tropics dis
tinctlv loses nerve Wethink that heat demor-
allies, but when Spain ANTICIPATED Great
Britain and conquered and oolonized cen
tinent, when three hundred Spanish ruihanS
led by brutal pigjobber trampled down
Semi-ciyilzed empire with millions Of inhab-
itantS, Spain was a hot as it Is now. We
speak of the exceptional prolifene~- of the
Anglo-Saxon, who Is now sending an army
of 100 600 men year to people America
and the Southern Continent, and never feels
the los but who peopled India and Southern
China, and the Southern shore of the Meli-
terranean, and Spanish America, except
races who must have lived for ages under the
sun? Il was not under hard gray weather
I that the Temple oi the sun rose in Baalhec,
/ or the columns of Lnxor. or the Coliseum
monuments .Rll Of them of human industry
as well a. Of human skill and domineering
energy. Grant that the work was done bv
slaves, it Is not by the feeble that slaves are
held in slavery.
But that force which i the cause Of pro-
gress, that energy which i always adyanc-
ing, Is peculiar to the people Of the hardy,
/ but temperate climes. l. it? Is England
hotter to the peasant than to the proprietor,
and how much has the peasant changed since
1 yillenage was abolished? Was Greece cool
er while Athens fell? If our civilization
goes on forever advancing, there may be eli-
dence that climate Is condition Of progress
but where Is the proof that it viii 90 on long
er than the Chinese, which must have ad-
yanced steadily for centuries, and Is now
stationary or retrograde? or than that of
Egypt, or than that Of Upper India, where
! well-known arts have utterly died out ? 1t
may Of course advance continuously, but it
i a pure assumption that it will, that there
IS any element of progress in the Northern
climates which the Southern do not possess,
anv source of force in the hard gray weather
which there Is not in the heat Of Asia. or in
the eternal sumner Of the Mediterranean
border lands Even the more recOndite eX-
PLANTATION 50 frequently offered to explain the
apparent progress Of the North and the ap-
parent stereotyping of the South, that wher-
ever the sun has great power nature dispi-
rits or crushes nan, fails to produce entire
conviction in our minds Why did she not
crush man in Egypt, with its secular ciyili-
cation, or in Bagdad, or in Benares, when
those cities were built, as well As now? Ma
ture was lust the same when man built those
fiying arches in Cambodia, or dug the water
courses Of the Iabylonian plain, as it is now,
when the races who won those victories
have passed away. Il is where nature is
haIsh, we are tod. that man rises by inces-
SAINT endeavor to his highest powers, bat na-
ture was no harder to the .Julii than to the
modern COl1nIas, while it was great deal
harder to the pcts, who did nothing, than
to the Lothian farmers, who do so very much.
That some law correlating progress, or what
we call Irogress, with material conditions
exists, is possible or probable, but it Is not
discovered vet, and when discovered, will
probably De found an exceedingly weak one,
the true source of difference being moral or
intellectesl, or most probable OF all, de-
pendent IN that faculty of which We know
as vet SC extremely little, the faculty which
separates man by an impossible line from
every other creature. the faculty of intellect
ual accumulation. If we could once be GER
tain that there are races who possess this i'll in
iinitesinal quantity, or in limited quantity
or in excessively different degrees, we should
know rhv Tasmanians die, why the Chinese
stop, and why the Teutonic mind, thickest
and slswest of all the greater minds, is mas
terine the world. At present. all we know
is thst Tasmania, the improved England of
: the South, bred singularly feeble Negrito ;
| that civilization grew first, and probably
: lastd Longest, in hot, Steamy, swampy,
z semrtropical valley and that most of the
, savage races, such As the Red Indians, the
t Rntons, and the Swiss lake-dwellers, have
$ d,elt for countless ages under the climatic
/, onditions which the Teuton, in his extreme
l surprise to find himself at the top of the
I. world, now quotes as those which favor pro
gressive civilization.
The GROUND BURNING UP.-FoRT PII.-
!, Lows BLUFF BANKS BuRSINc-A SugTERRA-
NEous CoxFLAcRArIoN.-0n Of the strangest
of phenomena of the times is reported to US
from the sight of old Fort Pillow, sixty miles
above this city. 1t is no more nor less than
i that the bluff bank of the river, which rises
fifty or sixty feet above the water level, is on
9 Ere, and for the past several weeks has been
: steadily burning like volcano for distance
I Of several hundred yards along. the east side
I of the river on a line ten or twelve feet above
! the water level. At night lurid flame or
i blaze of fire rises from the side OF the bluff
d | IN n heirht of ,,vo or three feet which then