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" Every country," says M. Ragozin, in his history of Chaldea, 

 " makes its own people," i.e., he goes on to say, " the mode of hfe 

 and the intellectual culture of a people are shaped by the character- 

 istic features of the land in which it dwells." One calls to mind 

 at once, in illustration of this, the patriotic Swiss and Highlander, 

 the " hardy Norseman " of Scandinavia, and, generally, the per- 

 severing people of the North temperate regions. And we contrast 

 them with the more enervated ease-loving nations dwelling under 

 a tropical sun, in a paradise of luxury, lotus-eaters, living in 



" A land 

 In which it seemed always afternoon, 

 A land where all things always seemed the same." 



Compare for a moment the native civilisations of India and 

 Greece. In the former country the works of nature are of startling 

 magnitude— sublimely and awfully grand, often terrible and 

 threatening. The early peoples were intimidated by them, the 

 huge snow-clad peaks, ranged in tiers rising one behind another, 



" Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurled, 

 " The fragments of an earlier world " 



the flooded rivers, the impassable forests, the swamps and jungles, 

 where it was death to tread, all awed them with their known 

 and still more with their unknown terrors, and taught them their 

 own feebleness. Hence the character of their religion, their im- 

 possible and altogether unhuman gods, hundred-headed monsters — 

 a religion altogether based on terror. 



In bright sunny Greece on the contrary, the varied and smiling 

 aspect of natural phenomena, not too huge, the happy climate, the 

 blue sea, and the variety in its coast line, inspired no terror, 

 confidence rather than fear. Nature tempted them to examine, 

 not to avoid. They studied under her, and physical science 

 became possible. And so the Grecian mythology had nothing 

 terrible about it ; its gods are human, very human, with human 

 attributes, tastes and pursuits, not always it is true of a very high 

 order. We might also compare the architecture of the two 

 countries, and note the effect of physical geography upon that ; 

 producing the huge massive temples of early Indian times, and the 

 light pleasing structures of ancient Greece. Art, too as you know, 

 reached a perfection there, from which we are told, it has ever 

 since been declining. 



Take another illustration. How shall we account for the roving 

 disposition which has characterised the Bedouin Arabs from the 

 time when " Ishmael became a wild man " up to the present hour ? 

 And along with it as a necessary consequence, all their well known 

 bravery, hospitality, generosity, and love of plunder ? Their 

 country made them what they are " They cannot," says Ragozin, 

 " build cities on the sand of the desert, and the small patches of 



