Trade- Winds, Rio Janeiro, the Polar Ice, c^c. 203 



learned Dr. Halley, or by Ovid, or any of the poets of antiquity, 

 elsewhere beyond the Goat and Crab. 



Ludicrous digressions apart: It is, however, certain that every 

 climate, and every change in it, has its specific and relative in- 

 fluence on man ; and thus it is that every place has its endemic 

 or prevailing diseases, favoured, howevrr, by accidental and local 

 circumstances. In England, for instance, the density of the at- 

 mosphere, the prevailing humidity, and occasional siccity of it, 

 and the mutability of temperature, are the exciting causes to 

 rheumatisms, asthmas, catarrhs, and pulmonary disorders, so 

 prevalent in it, and that afterwards, on their occurrence, prove 

 inimical to their cure. On the contrary, in climates intensely 

 hot, as Rio de Janeiro, and those parts of the Brasils already 

 mentioned, the atmosphere is remarkable for its tenuity, its 

 mildness, and its comparative inequality of temperature; and 

 these disorders, it is true, rarely take place, unless in extraor- 

 dinary instances of exposure by night, or unless among the Ne- 

 groes, who go about almost naked in the sun, and in this state 

 at night stretch their fatigued bodies on the damp ground. — 

 Again, that gloom or heaviness of the mind, which so frequently 

 seeks refuge in self-destruction in England, is in those climates 

 utterly unknown. That starting from sleep, peculiar to melan- 

 cholic serious or irritable minds, and common in cold, moist, and 

 heavy atmospheres, and the occasional intrusion, at the same 

 moment, of horrid anxiety for one's own or family's condition, 

 or of the varied " dreadful thought" of " eternity," are also, in 

 a physical sense, unknown. It is true that in those climates 

 the mind is notoriously influenced by the languor of the body ; 

 fitiil equanimity prevails amid the depression of the spirits, and 

 the mind has nothing of that northern dejected and repulsive, or 

 compassionated cast, alluded to, aljout it. Hence we perceive, 

 that although in such climates as the Brasils the mind is liable 

 to, and does actually suffer, amid the prevalence of a variety 

 of diseases, and particularly of dyspepsia, from the manifest 

 nervous connexion between the stomach and brain, through the 

 medium chiefly of the par vagum and vermis sympatheticiis 

 nnaximus; we however perceive, that a moist, dense and cloudy 

 atmosphere alone has a peculiar influence on the minil per se, 

 through the sympathetic and immediate agency of the nervous 

 system, and more particularly the primary source of it, the brain. 

 But then, on the other hand, as I have just intimated, the Brasi- 

 lian climates are notorious for the prevalence of the whole train 

 of symptoms constituting the disease of dyspepsia, and all those 

 diseases connected with the glandular system; — for torpor, con- 

 gestions or infarctions, as well as inllammation of the liver ; — for 



elephantiasis J 



