136 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Soudan and Northern Europe this natural law ceases to be 

 operative. Does it suddenly cease to act amongst the Nilotic 

 tribes, or is it in Egypt that he draws his line, or is it the 

 Mediterranean which says, " So far and no farther shall 

 atmosphere act upon skin"? No scientific man who admits 

 that the skin of certain races is affected by their environment 

 would dream of excluding the rest of mankind from similar 

 action ; even though Sir E. Ray Lankester may state dogmatically 

 that man can advance from the Equator to the Arctic circle 

 without undergoing any morphological change, no man of 

 science when once the facts are presented would believe this 

 for a moment. 



It is admitted by Mr. Houghton, as well as by every one 

 else, that the pigmentation of the Negro acts as a protection 

 against tropical light. At what point on the globe do the 

 inventions of Man, by which according to Sir E. Ray Lankester 

 he has freed himself from the laws which condition the rest 

 of nature, cease to act? At what point as we go north will 

 Sir E. Ray Lankester assert, " Here Man's clothes and houses 

 and fire shut him off from Nature's laws " ? So too, when we 

 come to Europe. Even in these climates where we northerns 

 dwell, arrayed in warm vesture against the assaults of Boreas, 

 our faces and hands are exposed to the direct action of 

 the atmosphere, and the air must circulate round us unless 

 we be clad in plaster. Yet our remote ancestors in their slow 

 struggle against Nature had but scanty raiment. The action 

 of the atmosphere suffered but little check from a skin thrown 

 over the shoulders to keep off the pelting rain. 



But even if clothes could check climatic action on the skin, 

 there are other ways in which environment is constantly acting 

 on man as it does on the rest of the mammals. Man has to 

 breathe, and therefore, unless he were able to rid himself of 

 his respiratory organs as he advanced north, the chemical and 

 physical processes of his body must be influenced by the nature 

 of the air inhaled by his lungs. No sane person will doubt that 

 the atmosphere of one region differs from that of another. If 

 it does not, why do we send those who are suffering from 

 pulmonary consumption to high altitudes, or to dry climates, 

 such as Australia or the Cape ? 



Again, Man, especially primitive Man, depends for subsistence 

 on the food produced by the locality in which he lives or in 



