544 CLIMATE AND CIVILIZATION. 



sciences ; industry and commerce languish, agriculture is despised. 

 But if, on the contrary, we proceed towards the north, we discover a 

 greater degree of civilization, a warmer devotion to labour. The 

 most industrious peoples of the world, the English and the Dutch, 

 inherit a cold, humid, and even foggy atmosphere. In Canada and 

 the northernmost States of the American Union, the Anglo-Saxon race 

 has lost nothing of its laborious habits and its enterprising audacity. 

 In Sweden and in Norway, in Russia, even in Siberia, the traveller 

 meets with towns and villages in a nourishing condition up to the 

 60th parallel of north latitude and beyond, under a climate whose 

 mean annual temperature is inferior to the mean winter temperature 

 of France, and where the thermometer frequently descends in winter 

 below 40 R. Thus, then, we see that the warm bland tropical air 

 enervates the mind as well as the body, while the cold of the north 

 seems to increase their energy. It is also true that cold climates, all 

 things considered, are healthier than hot countries, where disease is 

 more rapid and fatal in its inroads ; and that, finally, civilization 

 furnishes man with the means of protecting himself against the 

 injurious effects of a very low temperature, while it leaves him 

 without defence against those of excessive heat. We shall see here- 

 after that the human organism modifies itself, in the Polar regions, in 

 such a manner as to support, without too great suffering, a degree of 

 cold which at the outset it appears to us must be absolutely 

 intolerable. 



We may place between the isothermal lines of -f- 5 and of the 

 limit where commences the territory which, in the northern hemisphere, 

 merits the name of the Region of the Polar Deserts. Already, in 

 effect, under this glacial latitude, the landscape assumes a sombre 

 and desolate aspect, which seems to indicate the propinquity of the 

 " funereal glaciers " of the Pole. The daring traveller who beards the 

 Winter-king in his own realms meets no more with massive and lofty 

 mountain-crests ; a few only of the great chains of Europe and Asia 

 here the Scandinavian Alps, there the Oural Mountains ; still 

 further, at the easternmost extremity of Asia, some scattered summits, 



