MAMMALIA—MAN. 57 
them less white than the Europeans, to whom nothing is wanting which 
may render life comfortable and agreeable. Why are the Chinese whiter 
than the Tartars, whom they resemble in all their features? It is because 
they live in towns, because they are civilized, because they are provided 
with every expedient for defending themselves ‘from the injuries of the 
weather, to which the Tartars are perpetually exposed. 
When cold becomes extreme, however, it produces some effects similar 
to those of excessive heat. The Samoyedes, the Laplanders, the Green- 
landers, are very tawny; and it is even asserted, as we have already 
observed, that, among the Greenlanders, there are men as black as those 
of Africa. Here we see two extremes meet: violent cold and violent heat 
produce the same effect upon the skin, because these two causes act by one 
quality, which they possess in common. Dryness is this quality; and ‘t is 
a quality of which intense cold 1s equally productive as intense heat; so by 
the former, as well as by the latter, the skin may be dried up, altered, and 
rendered as tawny as we find it among the Laplanders. Cold compresses, 
shrivels, and reduces within a narrow compass, all the productions of 
nature; and thus it is, that we find the Laplanders, who are perpetually 
exposed to all the rigors of the most piercing cold, the most diminutive of 
the human species. 
The most temperate climate is between the degrees of forty and fifty. 
There we behold the human form in its greatest perfection ; and there we 
ought to form our ideas of the real and natural color of man. Situated 
under this zane, the civilized countries are, Georgia, Circassia, the Ukraine, 
European Turkey, Hungary, South Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, 
the north of Spain, and the northern part of the United States of America; 
of all which the inhabitants are the most beautiful, and the most shapely, 
in the world. 
As the first, and almost the sole cause of the color of mankind, we ought 
therefore to consider the climate; and though upon the skin the effects of 
nourishment are trifling, when compared with those of the air and soil, yet 
upon the form they are prodigious. Food which is gross, unwholesome, or 
badly prepared, has a strong and a natural tendency to produce a degeneracy 
in the human species; and in all countries where the people fare wretched- 
ly, they also look wretchedly, and are uglier and more deformed than their 
neighbors. Even among ourselves, the inhabitants of country places are 
less handsome than the inhabitants of towns; and we have often remarked, 
that in one village, where poverty and distress were less prevalent than in 
another village of the vicinity, the people of the former were, at the same 
time, in person more shapely, and in visage less deformed. 
The air and the soil have also great influence, not only on the form of 
men, but on that of animals, and of vegetables. Let us, after examining 
the peasants who live on hilly grounds, and those who live embosomed in 
the neighb wing valleys, compare them together, and we shall find that the 
