The true northerner. [volume] (Paw Paw, Mich.) 1855-1920, 1879-01-03
FROST FABLES.
The Moral Effects of Severe Winter.

IRON the CINCINNATI Commerclal.I
Popular prejudices are not always
confined to the dark ages and illiterate
classes of a nation, but may become
fashionable in the noontime of enlight-
eminent, and not among the morally
'shabby-genteel only, for the experience
of our own century proves that the
grossest absurdities may be defended
in the language of science, or, as Mons.
D'Alember expressed it, "that our ma
tional academies are turning out adopts
in the art of making nonsense plausi
BILE"
Throughout Northwestern Europe
and English-speaking North America,
people incline to think that high lati-
tude exercises an elevating influence on
the morals and scientific capacity OF
the human species, and that land of
perennial summer dooms its inhabit-
ants to state of permanent sloth and
ignorance, view which Col. Inger-
soil condenses, in his epigrammatic
way, by assuring us that civilization is
a plant which can only thrive in the
snow
Now, the truth is evidently this: That
civilization which fiourished in open air
during the golden age of the Mediter-
ranean nations has become dollhouse
plant in the nineteenth century. We
may hunt or fight i'll snow-storm; so
may the Sioux and the Seljuk Tartars;
but painting, fddling, preaching, the
Invention of labor-saving machinery,
she manufacture of shirts, steel pens,
newspapers, nutmegs and liberal lee
tures-in short, al the occupations that
distinguish the civilized biped from the
two7legged beast are still carried on in
warm climate, only with this difference:
That the inspiring warmth that once
emanated from the central body of the
solar system has now to be paid for in
the form of Youghiogheny coal and
kindling-wood. Cold, j. e., the absence
of warmth, per sc, is as unfavorable to
the process of life as darkness or rarefied
air; though partial explanation of our
modern worship may be found in
the circumstance that frost, like other
evils, has an indirect value as an anti
dote; it enables lis to indulge, with COM
parative impunity, in certain poisons
which the Southlander has to avoid on
pain of death.
A few monthsago the papers adverted
to the discovery OF California opium
eater who was able to sober up" at
ten minutes notice by swallowing he
role dose of arsenic; and more than 300
wears ago Paracelsus found that the
progress of a virlllent, and till hen in
durable disease could be arrested by
the internal use of mercury. These
remedies may be infallible, and, on the
whole, the lesser evil; but all that
would hardly justify the assertion that
sobriety and purity can only thrive ona
basis of arsenic and quicksilver; and
yet it is in a precisely analogous way
chat a cold climate counteracts a tend
ency TO sloth and ignorance, and miti-
gates the consequences of dictetic
abuses.
An intelligent observer, travelling
slowly from the equator toward the
North pole, might notice that with
every degree farther north the forms of
all organic life decrease in size and per
lection, and he might thus arrive at
conclusion which biologists have
reached by different route, viz: That
the tropics were the Original home of
hl hNliS tulllpS, silN eiub OiiiJ e'h "h
successful struggle for existence in
their Iative cline forced animals and
plants to snowward emigration. On
their way from India to Kamtschatka,
palm trees dwindled to bullrushes, ar
Dor vitae giants to juniper dwarfs, fern
trees Co ferns; tigers shrank to wild
soets and bears to blindworms; and
there seems an q PRIOR improbabihty
in the idea that man alone should inn
prove under influences which stunt the
development of all other organic be-
,ings. The paradise tradition and num-
'beriess national sagas point toward a
southern origin Of the human race (not
TO mention the Darwinian indicia in the
same direction): A former happier
existence of beings of our species who
held the lease of life on more generous
terms and enjoyed centuries of un-
bought pleasures which now only the
wealthy can purchase for a few de-
AIDES.
Alexander Won Humboldt remarks
.apropos of a Brazilian fruit plantation