CLIMATE AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT. 323 



titles of blubber and oil ; and his digestive system, heavily taxed in 

 providing the wherewith to meet excessive loss by radiation, supplies 

 less material for other vital purposes. This great physiological cost 

 of individual life, indirectly checking the multiplication of individuals, 

 arrests social evolution. 



A kindred relation of cause and effect is shown us in the Southern 

 Hemisphere by the still more miserable Fuegians. Living nearly un- 

 clothed in a region of continual storms of rain and snow, w^hich their 

 wretched dwellings of sticks and grass do not exclude, and having 

 little food but fish and mollusks, these beings, described as scarcely 

 human in appearance, have such difficulty in preserving the vital bal- 

 ance in face of the rapid escape of heat, that the surplus for individ- 

 ual development is narrowly restricted, and, by consequence, the sur- 

 plus for producing and rearing new individuals. Hence the numbers 

 remain too small for exhibiting any thing beyond incipient social ex- 

 istence. 



Though, in some tropical regions, an opposite extreme of tempera- 

 ture so far impedes the vital actions as to impede social development, 

 yet hindrance from this cause seems exceptional and relatively unim- 

 portant. Life in general, and mammalian life along with it, is great 

 in quantity as well as individually high, in localities that are among 

 the hottest. The inertness and silence during the noontide glare in 

 such localities do, indeed, furnish evidence of enervation ; but in 

 cooler parts of the twenty-four hours there is a compensating energy. 

 And if it is true that varieties of the human race, adapted to these 

 localities, show us, in comparison with ourselves, some indolence, this 

 does not seem greater than, or even equal to, the indolence of the 

 primitive man in temperate climates. 



Contemplated in the mass, the facts do not countenance the cur- 

 rent idea that great heat hinders progress. Many societies have arisen 

 in hot climates, and in hot climates have reached large and complex 

 growths. All our earliest recorded civilizations belonged to regions 

 w^hich, if not tropical, almost equal the tropics in height of tempera- 

 ture. India and Southern China, as still existing, show us great social 

 evolutions within the tropics. And, beyond this, the elaborate archi- 

 tectural remains of Java and of Cambodia yield proofs of other tropi- 

 cal civilizations in the East ; while the extmct societies of Central 

 America, Mexico, and Peru, need but be named to make it manifest 

 that in the New World, also, there were in past times great advances 

 in hot regions. 



It is thus, too, if we compare societies of ruder types that have de- 

 veloped in warm climates, with allied societies belonging to colder 

 climates. Tahiti, the Tonga Islands, and the Sandwich Islands, are 

 within the tropics ; and in them, when first discovered, there had 

 been reached stages of evolution that were remarkable considering 

 the absence of metals. So that, though excessive heat hinders the 



