836 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE 



personal discomfort and create the required stimulus for their 

 gratification, when they are tempted to let themselves lapse into 

 savag-e Corsican sloth. In the thousands of years which may yet 

 intervene between us and the necessity for a southward exodus, 

 these cravings and uneasinesses will have become more inseparably 

 a part of our nature than even the most optimistically-minded 

 member of the London School Board can as yet assert they have 

 become. I have not far to look for another authority who will 

 assure us that the desire and appetite for intellectual enjoyment 

 may become as really a ' constitutional demand ' as those lower 

 stimuli which in 'old, unhappy, far-off times' enabled man to 

 subdue other gregarious animals to his own uses, and, so aided, to 

 overrun victoriously the whole globe. Your secretary, Mr. Bates, 

 after eleven years of absence from England, to which the world 

 owes his charming work the ^Naturalist on the River Amazon,' 

 and after seeing many tribes living in the happy position in which 

 a moderate amount of light work will produce for the simple, 

 peaceful, and friendly people all the necessaries of their simple life 

 (1. c. vol. ii. p. 137 of the 'Mundurucus^), found yet (p. 416) — 



' after three years of renewed experience of England, how incomparably superior is 

 civilised life, where feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant nourishment, to the 

 spiritual sterility of half-savage existence, even if it were passed in the garden of 

 Eden. What has struck me,' says Mr. Bates, * powerfully is the immeasurably greater 

 diversity and interest of human character and social conditions in a single civilised 

 nation, than in equatorial South America, where three distinct races of man live toge- 

 ther. The superiority of the bleak north to tropical regions, however, is only in their 

 social aspect, for I hold to the opinion that although humanity can reach an advanced 

 state of culture only by battling with the inclemencies of nature in high latitudes, it 

 is under the equator alone that the perfect race of the future will attain to complete 

 fruition of man's beautiful heritage, the earth '.* 



* v. Baer, who after making himself in his earliest years a prince among biologists, 

 became in his later years a not inconsiderable geographer, expressed himself in Kussian 

 so long ago as 1848 in one of the geographical manuals of the Geographical Society of 

 Russia to much the same effect as the two writers above quoted. His words were 

 translated into German no earlier than 1873, and stand as follows in his 'Studien aus 

 dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschaft,' Theil ii. Halfte i. pp. 45-46 : — 



* Mit recht propheziet daher aus dieser Productions-Kraft der Tropenwelt ein 

 geistreicher Botaniker, Herr Meier in Konigsberg, dass der Mensch, in der civilisirten 

 Welt rasch sich mehrend, in die heisse Zone zuriickwandernwerde. Jamaica allein, so 

 gross ungefahr als das Konigreich Sachsen, werde vielleicht 25, ganz gewiss aber I2| 

 Mai so viel Menschen ernahren konnen als Sachsen. Und wie viele, setzen wir 

 hinzu, die Waldflache Brasiliens ! Verkehrt genug nennt man diesen Boden einen 

 jungfraulichen. Er trug nur fiir den Menschen bisher wenig Frucht. Dagegen hat 

 der Haushalt der Natur Jahrtausende hindurch in ihm organischen Stoflf aufge- 



