THE INFLUENCE OP CLIMATE. 89 



significance; and this is determined by figures, so that we , 

 must acknowledge that in most cases each race is by its nature 

 attached to the ground which supports it, and that it is not i 

 with impunity that it oversteps its limits. 



It is because a foreign climate has in general a really de- 

 structive influence, producing degeneracy among emigrants, 

 that is to say, a parallel morbid alteration of both the intellect 

 and the body, that we always see the same races moving about 

 in the same areas, and disappear when they pass them.* If 

 the Semite, who has left Yemen, has come to pasture his 

 camels near the shores of the ocean, opposite the Fortunate 

 Islands, it is because he and his animals find in the Kiff the same 

 conditions of life that they did by the Nile and the Isthmus 

 of Suez. Whatever has been said about the Jews and some 

 other races, not one of them seems to be really cosmopolitan. 

 To admit that a Jewish tribe, thrown into the midst of a black 

 population, has become black by the sole action of the climate, 

 is to admit that there were no conversions, no adoptions, and 

 no sexual unions contrary to the law of Moses ; and in this 

 way the philosophic editors of the Code Napoleon, as well as 

 daily medical practice, teach us what to think. For our part, 

 we only see in these transformations of Jewish families, esta- 

 blished far away, the result of the absorption of the type of a 

 small group of emigrants by a population which outnumbers 

 them. The Jew has disappeared; the language has been 

 transmitted like the belief, and also the name. 



The acclimatisation of man, as well as of the wild animal, 

 takes place only when he finds the conditions of existence sen- I" 

 sibly identical with those in which he has been created. Be- j 

 yond that, nature punishes him for having overstepped the/ 

 limits which she had assigned to him, and within which he^ 

 ought to continue to move his organism in relation to this de- 

 fined medium. The domestic animal, on the contrary, by rea- 

 son of this malleability of which we have before spoken, ac- 

 commodates itself in general very conveniently. And the 



* W. Edwards, Des Caracteres Physiologiques des races humaines, p. 14. 

 Niebuhr (transl.), Lectures on Ethnography, vol. i, p. 374. 



