MAMMALIA— MAN. 57 



them less white than the Europeans, to whom nothing is wanting which 

 may render life comfortable and agreeable. Why are the Chinese whiter 

 than the Tartars, whom they resemble in all their features ? It is because 

 they live in towns, because they are civilhed, because they are provided 

 with every expedient for defending themselves from the injuries of the 

 weather, to which the Tartars are perpetually exposed. 



When cold becomes extreme, however, it produces some effects similar 

 to those of excessive heat. The Samoyedes, the Laplanders, the Green- 

 landers, are very tawny ; and it is even asserted, as we have already 

 observed, that, among the Greenlanders, there are men as black as those 

 of Africa. Here we see two extremes meet : violent cold and violent heat 

 produce the same effect upon the skin, because these two causes act by one 

 quality, which they possess in common. Dryness is this quality; and it is 

 a quality of which intense cold is equally productive as intense heat; so by 

 the former, as well as by the latter, the skin may be dried up, altered, and 

 rendered as tawny as we find it among the Laplanders. Cold compresses, 

 shrivels, and reduces within a narrow compass, all the productions of 

 nature ; and thus it is, that we find the Laplanders, who are perpetually 

 exposed to all the rigors of the most piercing cold, the most diminutive of 

 the human species. 



The most temperate climate is between the degrees of forty and fifty. 

 There we behold the human form in its greatest perfection ; and there we 

 ought to form our ideas of the real and natural color of man. Situated 

 under this zone, the civilized countries are, Georgia, Circassia, the Ukraine, 

 European Turkey, Hungary, South Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, 

 the north of Spain, and the northern part of the United States of America; 

 of all which the inhabitants are the most beautiful, and the most shapely, 

 in the world. 



As the first, and almost the sole cause of the color of mankind, we ought 

 therefore to consider the climate ; and though upon the skin the effects of 

 nourishment are trifling, when compared with those of the air and soil, yet 

 upon the form they are prodigious. Food which is gross, unwholesome, or 

 badly prepared, has a strong and a natural tendency to produce a degeneracy 

 in the human species ; and in all countries where the people fare wretched- 

 ly, they also look wretchedly, and are uglier and more deformed than their 

 neighbors. Even among ourselves, the inhabitants of country places are 

 less handsome than the inhabitants of towns ; and Ave have often remarked, 

 that in one village, where poverty and distress were less prevalent than in 

 another village of the vicinity, the people of the former were, at the same 

 time, in person more shapely, and in visage less deformed. 



The air and the soil have also great influence, not only on the form oi 

 men, but on that of animals, and of vegetables. Let us, after examining 

 the peasants who live on hilly grounds, and those who live embosomed in 

 the neighboring valleys, compare them together, and we shall find that the 



