PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCHES. 95 



the New World, with the sensual, volatile, and almost animalized savages, who are 

 still to be found in some quarters of the Old World. 1 



On the other hand, according to Professor Guyot, it is vegetable life alone that 

 receives a favorable development under the moist and warm influences of the Ame- 

 rican climate. In both the southern and the northern continents, " this luxuriant 

 vegetation, it might be said, seems to stifle the higher life in the animal world. 

 Animal life is, as it were, overruled, enfeebled; it does not occupy here the first rank, 

 which is its due." " Among the superior animals, development seems to be arrested ; 

 it is incomplete ;" and, with the exception of some superior types in North America, 

 "they have not the strength nor the indomitable courage, nor the ferocity, nor the 

 intelligence, of the similar creatures of the Old World." He pronounces that " man 

 himself, the indigenous man, bears in his whole character the ineffaceable stamp of 

 this peculiarly vegetative nature." " His lymphatic temperament betrays the pre- 

 ponderance in his nature of the vegetative element." " If he sometimes exhibits 

 a display of prodigious muscular force, he is yet without endurance." " The con- 

 formation and position of the New World give to it a hot and watery climate ; this 

 impresses its own character on all the organized creation." 2 



Instead of perceiving any analogy between the laws that govern the animal and 

 vegetable kingdoms, and control their distribution, and those that affect mankind, 

 Professor Guyot finds a decided opposition in the two. " There is," he says, " a 

 particular law which presides over the distribution of the human races, and of 

 civilized communities taken at their cradles ; a different law from that which 

 governs the distribution of plants and animals." 3 



If we may believe Dr. Knox, this climate, which so depresses the energies of the 

 red man, is positively destructive to the European. He maintains that climate has 

 no permanent influence in altering the races of man, but may and does destroy 

 them; that the Saxon decays in Northern America; and were the supplies from 

 Europe not incessant, he could not stand his ground in these new countries ; that 

 already the United States man differs in appearance from the European. Not that 

 this indicates the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon into the red Indian, but is a warn- 

 ing that the climate was not made for him, nor he for the climate. 4 



If climate has power to change not only the complexion, but the bony structure 

 of man, the form of his skull, the cast of his features, and the model of his frame, 

 and if association among different races, without intermixture, tends to produce 

 similarity of appearance, all arguments against the European or Asiatic origin of 

 the American Indians, derived from their peculiar physiological conformation are 

 deprived of their force; for, however various the sources, from which they might 

 have sprung, they would become. moulded, according to that theory, into uniformity, 

 by a natural proclivity incident to this hemisphere. 



A doctrine similar to that of President Smith is advanced by Dr. Carpenter as 



1 Nat. Hist, of Man, II, 497, 501. 



3 The Earth and Man. By Arnold Guyot: Boston, 1850. Lecture VIII. 



3 The Earth and Man. Lecture "VII. 



* The Races of Men : a fragment. By Robert Knox, M. D. ; Thilad. ed., pp. 44 and 57. 



