THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 479 



his doors and windows hermetically closed. During the noontide 

 glare, when the youngsters of the native patricians run about in white 

 muslin inexpressibles, and their plebeian comrades in a still less ex- 

 pressible and certainly unspeakably sensible costume, the children of 

 the north have to mourn their exile in black broadcloth, woolen 

 stockings, boots or air-tight gaiters, tight-fitting collars, neckties, and 

 waistcoats, besides the unavoidable flannel undershirt. And, worse 

 than that, the ex-hyperborean not only continues to gorge himself with 

 an amount of calorific food that would more than suffice for the cli- 

 matic exigencies of his own latitude, but persists in eating that ex- 

 cessive amount in the specially indigestible form of fried and broiled 

 meat, served smoking hot with greasy sauces, after a prelude of su- 

 dorific doses of hot soups or narcotic drinks. In a cold climate the 

 pathological results of overfeeding are chiefly limited to the evils of 

 mal-nutrition, i. e., the difficulty of eliminating the cachectic elements 

 of a mass of accumulated and fermenting ingesta. But in a warm 

 climate that result is complicated by the further difficulty of maintain- 

 ing the normal temperature of the system. For the organic functions 

 of the animal body require a uniform degree of warmth as a condition 

 of their healthy performance, and in the human body the normal 

 average of that temperature has been found to be about 98 Fahr. A 

 variation of only two degrees denotes an abnormal depression or ac- 

 celeration of functional activity, a difference of five degrees indicates 

 a serious disease. In the polar regions, where a rousing stove-fire 

 often fails to thaw the rime-frost on the stove-pipe, the organism of 

 the human body contrives to maintain its blood-heat within half a 

 degree of the normal average, i. e., sometimes at a temperature of 150 

 above that of the external air. In the tropics the same marvelous or- 

 ganism becomes a refrigerating apparatus, and lowers its temperature 

 as much as thirty degrees below that of the outer atmosphere, which 

 in British India, for instance, has been seen at 132 above zero, or a 

 hundred degrees above the freezing-point. 



In these thermal regulations, Nature has, however, to rely on the 

 co-operation of instinct or reason ; and a mariner who would wear the 

 same dress on a north-pole expedition and a trip to Suez could hardly 

 hope to escape the consequences of his imprudence. But even if the 

 Arctic explorer should not only forget his furs, but intentionally chill 

 his blood by sitz-baths on an ice-floe, and promenades in the costume 

 of the Nereids, his chances of continued health could hardly be worse 

 than those of the British merchant who practices in the tropics the 

 calorific artifices of his native land, and aggravates the blood-seething 

 effects of a West Indian summer by superfluous clothes and worse than 

 superfluous beefsteaks and sudorific drinks. The blood of the sitz- 

 bathing mariner would congeal ; the blood of the beef-eating merchant 

 does ferment. With all diversity of opinion as to the proximate cause 

 of climatic fevers, there is no doubt that the febrile blood-changes 



