470 THE MOUNTAIN. 



tions of temperate zones, strange equipoise in the contest 

 of conservating and dissolving powers, life, tough, tena- 

 cious life, in the tissue and organ slowly eaten and con- 

 sumed by the death of the molecule, the furor of combustion 

 being the agonizing surrender of the painfully worried and 

 exhausted cell. Add to this the morbid galvanics of 

 frigid zones, frosty rheumatisms, writhing neuralgies, with 

 the deadening arrestation of development of electrical and 

 vital organs, etc. etc., in short, diseases of continents, dis- 

 eases of islands, diseases of heights or mountains, diseases 

 of depths or valleys, diseases from heat, diseases from cold, 

 from dryness, from moisture, from light, from darkness, and 

 all the powers and qualities of localities alone. This is a 

 wide field for scientific zeal and benevolence to exhaust. 



That there are positive and demonstrable laws of habitats 

 with reference to this climatal and specific power, is proved 

 by numberless observations. An example of special climatal 

 influence is seen and felt in the effects of certain winds. 

 These, in different regions, have their names sirocco, solano, 

 autun, monsoon, mistral, northeaster, norther associated in 

 common parlance with positive states and conditions of the 

 body, and are well known to produce most characteristic 

 physiological and pathological effects. In this connection, 

 many localities of specific poisons, also sites of hygienic and 

 therapeutic powers, might be mentioned. As the natural 

 history of the special powers of climate has been ascertained, 

 more specific results have accrued in rendering the catalogues 

 of diseases of which they are curative or to which deleteri- 

 ous in other words, of conditions of media, either hygienic, 

 therapeutic, or lethiferous. Leaving out these specific ele- 

 ments, the points fixed and established have been geographic, 

 or relationship to latitude ; topographic, or to the place or 

 site as related to oceans and continents, lakes and moun- 

 tains, as in the question of altitude and mere vertical eleva- 

 tion above the sea ; also, of relationships purely meteoric, 

 as in the motions of bodies of air, their electrical and hygro- 

 metric states, with calorical conditions, revealing the force 

 of the imponderables, as of heat, the great life element, the 



