PEODUCED BY MAN. 835 



trees play so essential a part, may remind us of Linnaeus's often - 

 quoted saying, ' Man dwells naturally within the tropics, and lives 

 on the fruit of the palm-tree ; he exists in other pai-ts of the world, 

 and makes shift to feed on corn and flesh.' But it may suggest a 

 little more than this. It may cause us to think seriously on the 

 question what will be, not the effect on external nature which man's 

 action will produce, but what will be the effect which external 

 nature will produce upon man, if by some recrudescence of a glacial 

 period, either in a geological sense, or in the economic sense, which 

 an exhaustion of our supply of Nearctic as well as Palaearctic coal 

 would, in the absence of any substitute, bring about, we should be 

 driven southwards, and become tropico- instead of cosmopolitan. 

 What will be the effect of the easy terms upon which life can be 

 maintained in the tropics upon the species which has, hitherto 

 never developed a lasting civilisation except under the stimulation 

 ' curis acuens mortalia corda ' of northern latitudes or mountain 

 elevation ^ ? How will it fare with intellectual culture when and 

 where, not to speak any further of our date-palm, the cocoanut-palm, 

 the banana, the breadfruit, will make exertion so all but superfluous 

 for the dura a stirpe geyiera who now govern the world ? If we are 

 to guide ourselves as we peer into the twilight of the future by 

 what we can see going on in the broad Mediterranean noonday of the 

 present, the example of the idle Corsican is not altogether en- 

 couraging. A Corsican family, we are told by their French fellow- 

 citizens 2, with a couple of dozen of chestnut-trees, and with a herd 

 of goats which ' find themselves,' to the great disgust of all 

 botanists, have no aspirations left to satisfy beyond that of being 

 able to buy a gun, to the great disgust of all sportsmen. In 

 a matter of prophesying, Sir, the argument from authority and 

 authorities has its legitimate place, and upon the present occasion 

 it happens to have a very legitimate time ^. I have in a work on 

 •Hereditary Genius,' published in the year 1869, found it stated 

 that 'No Englishman of the nineteenth century is purely nomadic:' 

 and that even the most so among them have also inherited many 

 civilised cravings which are necessarily starved, and thus entail 



1 Wallace, 'Natural Selection.' p. 318; and Bonstetten, 'L'homme du Midi et 

 rhomme du Nord,' 1826, passim. 



^ Hehn, 1. c. p. 346. 



3 [On the evening when this lecture was delivered the chair was occupied by 

 Francis Galton, Esq., F.R.S., author of a work on Hereditary Genius.— Editor,] 



3H 2 



