84 THE INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 



it modifies itself to everybody's will. Its organism may be 

 considered as being in a state of unstable equilibrium, so that 

 the least influence causes this organism to vary, and with the 

 least possible delay, to a considerable degree.* But when 

 man ceases for an instant to be attentive in directing these 

 modifications, when he forgets himself for a moment, nature 

 always vigilant and ready to seize upon her rights destroys 

 all this human edifice, and recalls the animal to a type which 

 may be called normal, but which is not the type of the stock, 

 since nature, acting on an organism endowed, as we have just 

 said, with the wonderful malleability and ductility acquired by 

 domesticity, immediately and naturally modifies the animal, 

 which is restored to liberty, by the power of the new medium 

 into which it is cast. 



Nothing of the same sort takes place with mankind. This 

 does not mean, however, that he cannot also be reduced to a 

 state of domesticity. f Slaves, indeed, are nothing else; and 

 all that is wanting in order to place them in comparison with 

 animal domesticity, would be the history of a race of Ilotes, 

 which has always been free from any mixture, and has continued 

 so during a time equal to that which separates us from the first 

 conquest of the dog, the sheep, and the ox, upon the high 

 table-lands of Asia. 



Let us, then, leave all comparison J between man, free to 

 come, to go, and to choose his own food, and domestic animals. 

 Let us return to those who live free, and say, once for all, that 

 if we stop our progress with so many details concerning these 



* " What would be thought of a breeder who took Norman colts or Flemish 

 calves to the high lands of the Alps and the Pyrenees, and then expected to 

 see them reproduce (their training having been finished) all the pure charac- 

 teristics of the original races ?" Isidore Geoffroy Saint- Hilaire, Histoire 

 Naturelle Gene'rale, vol. iii, p. 307. 



f See Verneuil, Bulletins de la Societe d' Anthropologie, February 2, 1860. 

 Bonte, ibidem, August 6, 1863. 



[" A priest who has drunk wine shall migrate into a moth or a fly, feed- 

 ing on ordure. He who steals the gold of a priest, shall pass a thousand 

 times into the bodies of spiders. If a man shall steal honey, he shall be 

 born a great stinging gnat ; if oil, an oil-drinking beetle ; if salt, a cicada ; 

 if a household utensil, an ichneumon fly" (Institutes of Menu, 353). Thus, 

 apparently with regard to comparison, the Hindu considers insects to be the 

 lowest form of animal life, into which moral criminals are to pass after death, 

 according to their doctrine of metempsychosis. EDITOR.] 



