﻿80 ATMOSPHERE IN RELATION TO HUMAN LIFE AND HEALTH. 



intellectual, healthy, and progressive people of the world are those 

 which inhabit the temperate zones. Within the tropics the strongest 

 and most energetic peoples, bodily and mentally, are those living 

 in the mountains or at high altitudes. The inhabitants of low ground 

 in hot climates are inclined to be listless, uninventive, apathetic, 

 and improvident. They live for the day, shut their eyes on the future, 

 and have a leaning toward fatalism. An equable high temperature 

 with much moisture weakens body and mind. No long-established 

 lowland tropical race is a conquering race in the widest sense of the 

 term, or forward in the march of intelligence. But certain nations have 

 the power of resisting, at any rate for a long time, the enervating 

 influence of a moist, warm climate, with the malarious fevers which 

 commonly belong to it. The Arabs and Chinese evince extraordinary 

 power in this respect. The Arabs not only thrive in their own hot, dry 

 country, but on the coast and in the interior of Africa, where the 

 negroes are driven like sheep before them. The Chinese make excellent 

 and most industrious laborers, even in the climate of Java, Sumatra, 

 and Borneo, and where neither Malays nor Europeans persist in the 

 hard work of cultivation. Their fare is rather scanty, and, as a rule, 

 entirely vegetable. The Italians and Spaniards, again, can withstand 

 hot climates better than most Europeans. The Spaniards have greatly 

 multiplied in Cuba, the Portuguese do not desert the oi)pressive forest 

 regions of Brazil. The natives of the South of France thrive in Algeria 

 better than natives of the North of France. On the other hand, the 

 people of northern Europe, if they do not themselves suffer much in 

 the tropics, rapidly degenerate, and the race either becomes extinct or 

 greatly enfeebled in a few generations. In Java, Europeans do not 

 live beyond three generations. It was shown many years ago by a dis- 

 tinguished lady, and has now to some extent been long recognized by 

 military and civil authorities in India, that a very large part of the 

 excessive British mortality in India was owing in the first place -to 

 removable insanitary conditions, and in the second place, to faulty diet 

 and personal habits. The realization by the governing authorities of 

 the true and possible conditions of living in a hot climate has led to a 

 large reduction in the rates of sickness and death. Stokvis has shown 

 how in recent years Europeans have lived much better than formerly 

 in the tropics. Even children to the number of one hundred or more, 

 from the age of infancy to the age of 18 have grown up well in an 

 institution in Calcutta, where they were carefully tended. The improper 

 and excessive consumption of animal flesh, spirits and beer, and the 

 disregard of simple hygienic rules, still continue to give to climate an 

 ill name which fairly belongs to habit. Making full allowance, hbw- 

 ever, for these preventable causes of disease and degeneration, the fact 

 remains that children can only with difficulty grow to due strength and 

 capacity in the climate of India and the lowland tropics generally. They 

 begin to flag after their fourth year. Common experience demonstrates 



