THE ENVIRONMENT OF GRECIAN CULTURE. 201 



flowing in little cascades like the Neda, or full to the banks like 

 the Ladon ; rivers like the Alpheus and Achelous, which can not 

 be forded even in the dry season ; with Lake Phensea, in the 

 Peloponnesus, resembling the lakes of Switzerland. Yet water is 

 rare and inestimably precious ; and that explains the worship 

 that was given to the nymphs of fountains, and the care that was 

 taken in art to give them forms of beauty corresponding to the 

 honors which popular piety rendered to them. 



The climates are as various as the physiological characteristics 

 of the landscape. On the shores of the bays and on the islands 

 the difference is slight between the mean temperatures of the 

 cold and the warm seasons ; but in the interior, in the closed val- 

 leys, the winters are severe and the summers hot. With such 

 varieties of land with its hundred faces, and the sky with its hun- 

 dred caprices, body and mind are kept under perpetual strain to 

 adapt themselves to the complex and mobile conditions of media 

 that are modified with a rapidity that discounts all forecasts. 

 Within a very narrow space are men of the same race and lan- 

 guage leading very different lives accordingly as they dwell on 

 the mountains, the high pastures, the cultivated slopes, or the 

 shore. One who removes from one of these zones to another is 

 obliged to modify his habits, to add or take off something of his 

 clothing or his food, and perhaps to learn and exercise a new 

 occupation. This tends to stimulate the organs and give elasticity 

 to the mind, which is constrained by the force of circumstances 

 to improvise the methods of action which the conditions demand. 

 Thus everything concurred to develop personal energy among the 

 Grecian people, and to fortify and build up the race by virtue of 

 the law of the survival of the fittest. While infant mortality has 

 always been very high, in consequence of the abrupt contrasts, 

 those constitutions which succeeded in adapting themselves to 

 them acquired a singular elasticity. 



The marvelously clear atmosphere and bright skies of Greece 

 give the vision a delicacy which the sense can not attain where 

 all the contours are enveloped in vapors. There is thus developed 

 in it the habit of studying, comparing, and measuring forms from 

 a distance ; and it acquires in that practice those qualities of a 

 just perception and a quick feeling of the exact relations of the 

 different parts of a whole which, in the age when they were applied 

 to the interpretation and reproduction of the living form, con- 

 tributed to make the Greeks the first artists in the world. 



Artistic excellence was further favored by the very compo- 

 sition and nature of the rocks of Greece. The rocks of some dis- 

 tricts, when disintegrated, furnish an excellent plastic material, 

 equally suitable for bricks or tiles, and for modeling under the 

 fingers of the potter and sculptor; and when they retain their 



