INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 4()9 



Along- its northern border the country is but lightly broken by 

 mountainous ridges, and on its southern not at all. Primarily its 

 soil was very fertile, and eminently adapted to the production of 

 the great staple of cotton. 



Knowing these primary facts, it would require no prophetic 

 vision to pronounce, that a people inhabiting a country of such 

 striking diversities of climate, would naturally and necessarily give 

 themselves to such pursuits as had been predetermined by the 

 physical conditions of the various localities. Those dwelling along 

 the sea-border would build ships, and sail them across the ocean. 

 Those peopling the inland districts, would till the soil, carve the 

 timber, and hew the rocks, as the one or the other would yield the 

 better return. Wherever any one branch of industry could be 

 made largely more profitable than others, a large majority of the 

 population would follow it. These facts are so obvious as to seem 

 like truisms, but they cannot be overlooked, inasmuch as through 

 their agency as secondary causes, many significant results are pro- 

 duced. Modes of thought, not less than peculiarities in customs 

 and language, take direction from our pursuits. With a diversity 

 of employments, there will always be found a corresponding diver- 

 sity of mentality. The law that like produces like, is not confined 

 in its operations to any one realm in nature. A cause which brings 

 forth its direct and immediate results in its own plane of existence, 

 produces at the same time con-esponding results in higher orders 

 of life connected therewith. 



It is not too much to expect, that by the aid of the future per- 

 fected development of the science of physiology, and the broader 

 and more comprehensive science of comparative history, the dawn 

 of which we only now begin to see, we may be able to trace the 

 intellectual and moral effects of all our external conditions, not 

 only the more marked and demonsti-ative elements of nature, as 

 cold and heat, sunshine and tempest, but also the more subtile in- 

 fluences of changing. seasons, genial skies, and fruitful fields, down 

 through all the human devices of clothing, shelter, food and fire, 

 not less readil3^ than we now trace the eflects of a long continued, 

 high temperature upon the human comijlexion. Indeed, analogy 

 would lead us to infer that it is the more impressible part of man's 

 physical nature that feels the first impress of the altered conditions 

 of his human abode, and that long before such changes as we are 

 now able to detect have been wrought by climate, other and pro- 

 founder changes have taken place in his nervous system, indelibly 



