THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 39 



Islamized highlands of Central Asia. The most obstinate dis- 

 senters of the Greek Church have their strongholds in northern 

 Russia, while the heresies of the Cossacks are limited to ultra- 

 convivial celebrations of ecclesiastic holy-days. Even in ancient 

 Greece the South-Hellenic Spartans seem to have been much 

 less heterodox than their North-Hellenic rivals. 



The supposed concomitance of low latitudes and low mor- 

 als — in Origen's sense of the word — is a theory considerably 

 modified by the reports of our latter-day north-pole explorers. 

 Chamisso, Pallas, Adams, Gabriel Sarytchew, and Kane agree 

 that certain tribes of the polar regions are sensual to a degree 

 that would have scandalized the natives of ancient Lesbia, and 

 certainly suffices to amaze the modern Cossacks, who, in their 

 turn, astonish the not over-scrupulous moralists of the Danubian 

 principalities. Among the Yakoots of northern Siberia mesal- 

 liances of an unmentionable kind are condoned as readily as 

 a still more unprecedented degree of sexual precocity which 

 Chamisso ascribes to the " almost exclusively animal diet of the 

 wretched pygmies.'' Our equally carnivorous Indians are, how- 

 ever, characterized by a sexual apathy which an able American 

 ethnologist seems inclined to consider a principal cause of their 

 gradual extinction; and Chamisso's hypothesis must probably 

 be supplemented by other explanations — for instance, the en- 

 forced idleness of his pygmies during the snow-bound season of 

 short days and overlong nights. Idleness may likewise account 

 for the erotic excesses of islanders enjoying the benefits of a 

 fertile soil and a genial climate, like the notorious natives of va- 

 rious parts of the Grecian Archipelago and the Lesser Antilles, 

 not to mention the ne plus ultras described in the reports of the 

 first South Sea explorers. As a rule, the prevalence of incon- 

 tinence bears an inverse ratio to the predominance of active 

 modes of life ; in any sense of the word, the contijience of hunt- 

 ers and nomads being almost rivaled by that of intensely indus- 

 trial communities. 



Cceteris paribus, however, precocity increases with the dis- 

 tance from the isotherm of Stockholm, about the sixtieth degree 

 of northern latitude in Europe and the forty-fifth degree in the 

 western hemisphere. North of that parallel the stunted and 

 short-lived hyperboreans marry as early as the premature chil- 

 dren of the tropics, tropical highland regions generally excepted. 

 The copper-colored natives of the Peruvian alturas marry late, 

 while under the same parallel the Creoles of the Brazilian low- 

 lands do not hesitate to encourage the matrimonial propensities 

 of children in their earliest teens, boys of fourteen and girls of 

 thirteen and twelve, or, if we shall believe Dr. Burmeister, even 

 of ten and nine. The courtships of Sicily, too, are expeditious, 



