322 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



He confesses his defeat when he sadly admits this last intrenchment 

 impregnable; for here, he says, "it must ever remain a drawn battle." 

 Rightly understood, not a drawn battle, but a victory to Religion, the 

 possessor of the citadel — a victory which grows more and more de- 

 cisive the more it is perceived that the "mind and heart of man him- 

 self" is the only territory it ever claimed — the only dominion it ever 

 attempted to defend. After all, is not the simple admission of a de- 

 vout mind, when it meets with some inexplicable fact — " God made it 

 so " — more philosophical than the shallow assertion of presumptuous 

 science, " We can never know ? " 



CLIMATE AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT.^ 



By HEKBERT SPENCER. 



LIFE in general is possible only between certain limits of tempera- 

 ture ; and life of the higher kinds is possible only w^ithin a com- 

 paratively narrow range of temperature, maintained artiiicially if not 

 naturally. Hence it results that social life, presupposing as it does 

 not only human life, but that life vegetal and animal on which human 

 life depends, is restricted by certain extremes of cold and heat. 



Cold, though great, does not rigorously exclude w^arm-blooded 

 creatures, if tlie locality supplies in adequate quantity the means of 

 generating heat. The arctic Fauna contains various marine .and ter- 

 restrial mammals, large and small ; but the existence of these depends, 

 directly or indirectly, on the existence of the inferior marine creatures, 

 vertebrate and invertebrate, which would cease to live there did not 

 the warm currents from the tropics check the formation of ice. Hence 

 such human life as w^e find in arctic regions^ dependent as it is mainly 

 on that of these mammals, is also remotely dependent on the same 

 source of heat. 



Here the fact we have to note is that, w^here the temperature which 

 man's vital functions require can be maintained with difiiculty, social 

 evolution is not possible. There can be neither a sufficient surplus 

 power in each individvial nor a sufficient number of individuals. Not 

 only are the energies of the Esquimaux expended mainly in defending 

 himself against loss of heat, and in laying up stores by which he may 

 continue to do this during the arctic night, but his physiological 

 processes are greatly modified to the same end. Without fuel, and, 

 indeed, unable to burn wdthin his snow-hut any thing more than an oil- 

 lamp, lest the walls should melt, he has to keep up that bodily warmth 

 which even his thick fur dress fails to retain, by devouring vast quan- 



^ From advance sheets of the "Principles of Sociology. — Part I. The Data of Sociol- 

 ogy. Chapter III. Original External factors." 



