Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Taking higher ground in this argument, we are the more strongly of opinion that the analogical mode of reasoning is a wrong one. We do not perceive how the analogies can be made good in the business. It seems fallacious to conclude, with Professor Agassiz, that, because plants and animals—as is generally believed—have not originated in a common centre, our race could not have so originated. To argue from the fact that such “inconsistencies” do not occur in the laws of nature is bad philosophy, after all. He does not clearly or fully know what Nature, or the power we are agreed to call Nature, intends for laws. He takes a department of the material world—a section embracing the Marsupiata, the Edentata, fishes of cartilagenous type, certain plants, flowers, and so forth; and, circumscribing it, he seems to look upon it as the proper sphere for the laws of nature to work in. But it is possible—indeed we believe it to be the truth—that Nature has laws ten millions of miles beyond and above that little circle, and that we do not know or even suspect one half of them. By what law of nature was the ball we cling upon launched into space, and man, “of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting,” put upon it? Certainly by one of those laws which we, not comprehending them, call miracles. Coming down a little from the summit of such high positions, we find that man is not the analogue of reptiles, fishes, animals, plants, and so forth—that he differs from them in something out of the rule—something miraculous—the “reasonable soul” which St. Athanasius speaks of. The philosophy of analogy is at fault here, and must be. Man enters none of the categories; he is neither an animal, a reptile, nor a fish. The laws of these are not the laws of Nature—the whole book—nor the laws of man. It is nonsense, therefore, to talk, with such an air, of “inconsistencies.” Even supposing that man may, on the Lamarckian principle, at any time of his development, have been a sponge and lived on salt water, he is, as he stands now—the laughing, the exchanging, the believing animal—not the less an exception and a miracle, and as such philosophers must deal with him.

It is not improbable, after all, that our materialist philosophers may be going astray. The doctrines of Bacon and Locke were noble pronunciamentos in their way and day, and fulfilled in a memorable degree one of the great laws of human progression. They displaced Aristotle, Ptolemy, and those other ancients who were the Bacons and Lockes of the earlier generations. It is not improbable that the founders of the English school of philosophy may, in time, yield to new teachers of men and obey the supreme laws of mutation. Nothing is permanent; every thing tends to something newer and higher. Bacon and Locke may yet abdicate their supremacy, and go away with the other mental and physical Megatheriums of the world—having lived their appropriate and necessary lives. They have built a noble materialist edifice; but they who come after them and strive to raise a metaphysical superstructure from it are probably building upon the wrong foundation. There is nothing any where to show that mind and matter are subject to the same laws—that the development and destiny of one belong, at all, to the other. We may yet be fated to know something more of the origin and end of man than we have been able to gather, ever since the first syllable of recorded time; but it must be by some means widely different from the circumscribed and earth-grubbing; philosophies which have risen amongst us of late, and which sometimes make us regard with a feeling of preference the transcendentalisms, infinite misty soarings, and so forth, of the Kantean school. We are so tired of Aristides Bacon, Aristides Locke, and those other solid thinkers, so repeatedly called the Just and the True, that we feel ourselves at times disposed to ostracise them.

We cannot bend man to the laws of Linnæus, Lamarck, or any one else. The arguments against the unity of his species, drawn from the unreasoning creation, are not at all convincing. They are very violent and clumsy. Messrs. Agassiz, Amringe, and others, desire to make a simple and consistent theory—one which shall have nothing miraculous in it. And yet to avoid one miracle, they adopt a dozen. They turn their backs upon their own development doctrine, and refuse to believe that the material of the human structure could undergo its changes in process of time, and under the various elemental influences. They argue that there must have been originally several creations of men, to suit the varying localities of the earth. Following their views, and taking the divisions of race made by different philosophers, we should find our beliefs blown about a good deal. For Blumenbach, Cuvier, and Latham, hold that the Deity made three species; Martin and Lawrence that he made five; Dumenil and Lesson that he made six; Fischer and others that he made seven; and Desmoulins and Pickering that he made eleven. But, in the midst of the confused indecision in which we are left, where would be the unreasonableness of taking the subdivisions of these divisions and asking why we may not look on _these_ as distinct species also—why, in fact, should there not have been creations equal in number to the twenty-four subdivisions? If these philosophers go on, making distinctions, (in which no two of them will be found to agree with the others,) where are they to stop? There are varieties enough in the osteology and general appearance of the races to warrant a hundred distinctions—therefore, a hundred creations. Why should we stop at three creations—or six, or eleven? It is as easy and more consistent to suppose half a hundred creations than half a dozen. Then those who contend for only three or four creations, admit a great number of varieties; and thus admit the principle that climate and other accidents can, after all, change the race from the exact condition of a type. Thus the principle of their argument is compromised—the philosophy of it is in a loose and untenable condition. It is a very clumsy hypothesis altogether:

How smiles
The gazer’s eye in philosophic mirth
To see the weak design!

Here we have the Deity forming several pairs of the race, to suit the several hills, plains, and peculiar configuration of the earth just rising above the slush and slime of the Saurian period. This shocks our ideas of divine wisdom. Our reason, such as it is, teaches us, and it seems to be generally received that creative power works with simplicity and not in repetitionary ways. And, taking another view of the case, we cannot conceive why the great Artificer should make different species expressly for different places. The argument that, because many plants are, or seem to be, proper to their peculiar habitats, man should be so to one place, is a feeble one. Man is not rooted, but biped; legs were given him for locomotion; unlike the other animals, he has got a mind and the _adductor pollicis_, and can build coracles, caravels, cunarders. The Supreme Being did not surely design that man should stay in any particular place. The children of men have been nomade from the beginning, moving over the surface of the globe, hither and thither, like the waves on the sea. If God did really produce three, or six, or a dozen distinct species—each for its own place, it was labor in vain and without foresight—a very ridiculous conclusion to come to.

It is generally admitted that within the reach of the historic periods, several predominant races proceeded from the middle of Asia, in several directions—north, south, east, and west. The advocates of the different species contend that there are no nomade invaders on record who did not find inhabitants in the countries they intruded on. If such were the case, the creation of these _autocthonoi_, or “children of the ground,” was an unnecessary thing; for the Hyperboreans, Mongols, Egyptians, Arabs, Circassians, Pelasgians, Getæ, and so forth, came to obliterate them and flourish in their stead. And if the invaders could thus flourish in localities for which they were not created, there would seem to have been little necessity for the creation of more than one species of man. Altogether, it does appear that the scheme of making a distinct species for distinct zones or parallels is incompatible with our received notions of divine wisdom.

As for the production and distribution of animals and plants, we have no objection to consider them on the Lamarckian principle. The germs of earth’s million vegetable varieties were and are doubtless scattered through the crust of the earth, to be modified by the elements which act upon the surface; they may exist in an infinitesimal manner, baffling to our senses and our ideas alike. The reptiles, fishes, and animals, probably owed their origin to _infusoria_ and a variety of changes following the law of development, and influenced by the sea or the sun. But between these and man—as we have already insisted—there is only an imperfect analogy, extremely helpless in this question of human derivation. That Lamarckian hypothesis—set forth so eloquently in the Vestiges of Creation—a work which, of a surety, belongs to Professor Nichol of Glasgow—answers very well for every thing but the man. Leave him out. Omit the part of Hamlet, and so play out the play. But man, the miraculous—that strange compound of dirt and divinity—will not be amenable to all this gradation—will not be put in a category and decided on, like a cactus or a kangaroo. He still remains apart—

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

Such are the considerations which lead us to reject the idea of a variety of pristine pairs. The arguments by which it is supported are many, but they are feeble. One of them is the fact, that, so far back as the records of the race have extended, the existing distinctions of it are discoverable. The most ancient Egyptian sculptures show the different features of the Negro and Ethiopian races, such as they appear at this day. These sculptures bear date nearly four thousand years ago; and it is concluded these heads had not time enough, since the beginning of the world, to be changed from a common type—seeing they have not since been changed in a lapse of time twice as long. They assume that our race has only been six thousand years on the globe. But that sort of argument is set aside by general consent. Chronological science is not among the truths which the Bible was intended to teach; with respect to the age of the world that venerable book is not historic nor authoritative. The most orthodox believers all over the world have admitted the demonstrations of geology; and we may safely conclude that our race has been roaming over the periphery of this planet for a longer period than that deduced by Usher from the Hebrew records. Philosophical science does not avail itself of such uncertainties as the world’s age is allowed to be. Again; it is argued by the doctors of development that a _pair_ could not naturally propagate a species. They keep their eyes very closely upon the habits of the lower animals. They do not consider what was contrary to nature in making the paragon of animals, only a little lower than the angels. The propagation of a species from a pair, seems a very conquerable sort of difficulty, compared with others, that lie along this field of our disquisition. Why should people strain so much at a gnat, after they have swallowed the dromedary?

We have been following this argument through the pages of Col. Smith’s work[1] on the Human Species, with an Introduction by Dr. Kneeland. The doctor gives the views of Pritchard, Agassiz, and others, _pro_ and _con_, on this matter, and subjoins his own opinions, supporting those of Agassiz, and claiming more than one original species. Dr. Kneeland’s conclusions seem lame enough. He argues, among other things, that a human mixture is bad. He says history proves that artificial breeds and mixed races of men have no permanency, and become extinct, unless they procure supplies from a pure stock. If this be true, God help these United States of ours! Here we are receiving increments from almost all the races of the world—certainly from all those of the old world—and making a perfect _olla podrida_ of our civilization! Are we to decline, fall away, perish and become extinct, if we do not call upon the pure Celtic, Teutonic, or Anglo-Saxon stock for large periodical supplies? We hope not. Intermixture may not turn out so fatally. England has certainly drawn her strength and empire, in a great measure, from the fountain of her mongrel blood of Peghts, Britons, Celts, Romans, Danes, Teutons, Northmen, and all the rest of them. And yet there may be, after all, something in this ethnic philosophy of Dr. Kneeland. Still it is not good to despair; and, in fact, there is much to console the future of this federation, should its mingled blood grow too much diluted. Ireland is bent on coming over here bodily; and the pure Celtic blood of that island will be happily available to the veins and arteries of our debilitated body politic!

In this question of the human species—whether there were many created, or only one—we think it most reasonable to abide by the old doctrine of a single pair, seeing that the advocates of repeated creations cannot overthrow it, nor recommend their own. It is, at all events, simplest to believe in one; for if you believe in more, you will soon be bewildered into the belief of twenty or thirty primordial pairs. Assuming, then, that the race first issued from some part of Central Asia—where it seems generally allowed that it originated—we see nothing very violent in the supposition, that climate and locality produced the varied appearances of the human family, which we see at this day. After a certain lapse of time, black races were found to exist—especially in Africa—exhibiting features which distinguished them, in a very marked manner, from the white and other varieties:—viz—flat noses, protruding thick lips, retreating foreheads, and a wooliness of hair. These peculiarities are found, more or less, in all the races of that continent; the exceptions are few—still exhibiting the prevailing marks of race. The Egyptians sculptured on monuments have features resembling those of the Negroes—in the breadth of nostril, the thickness of the lips, and the general expression, but certainly of a higher facial order. A number of authorities, among whom are reckoned Pritchard and Denon, sanction the idea, that the Egyptian must, in a great degree, be classed with the Negro race. This race exhibits no proof of having been created especially to occupy an appropriate place, for it is found in a hundred localities. Clans of Negroes have existed in Laristan, in Makran, in Persia, and on the Helmund. They are also scattered over the Indian Archipelago—bearing the Hindoo, Mongol, and Malay characteristics. The Papuas of Nicobar, the Philippine Islands, and these oriental longitudes, resemble the numerous tribes of Negro variety to be found in Africa. On the latter continent, the races have all a strong family likeness; marked, however, by diversities which seem to prove the existence of modifying influences. In South Africa, the Hottentots and Bushmen greatly resemble, in size and face, their brother men of the Mongolian stock, in the opposite latitudes—to wit, the Chinese, the Esquimaux, and the other tribes of Northern Asiatics. Some of these diversified Negro races have woolly hair, and others straight hair. The skulls of the woolly tribes cannot be classed sufficiently distinctly. They exhibit that variety which runs through all those dusky families, recognized as one stock from their general resemblance. Thus it would seem that races of men were made Negroes in Asia as well as in Africa—perhaps long before they reached the latter continent—in which similar elemental influences were prepared to produce a like result.

If we consider the other extremes of mankind which we call the Caucasian, Japhetic, Bearded, and so forth, we find no certain sign that they constitute a distinct species. They have such diversities among themselves, and such intermingling resemblances to other divisions of humanity, that it is bewildering and, indeed, impossible to abide by any arbitrary distribution of them. In Asia, the Caucasian features are blended with the Mongolian, and Capuan or Negro, in a variety of degrees, in different localities, and under many nomenclatures. Toward the West, the Caucasian face is modified into the Egyptian, which is still further modified into some of the several Negro types. Each of the extreme divisions is found to be connected with the other by many signs of common likeness, and the races seem imperceptibly to run into one another as they appear to be modified by locality, or habits of existence. We may mention, in passing—as showing the resemblance that human aspects bear to one another, though the owners of them may have their native habitats a thousand leagues asunder—that the daguerreotype of Erasmus York, (a Mongol boy,) taken a few months ago in London, presents a face which we thought we saw with a basket of oranges the other day, in the street, a few days after it had arrived from the county Galway, in an emigrant ship.

People have speculated a good deal on the aspect and general appearance of our first parents. Some suppose they had white skin—that Adam was colored and shaped somewhat resembling the Sagittarius Apollo, and that the first of women was like the finest of her daughters at Almack’s or Saratoga, in the season—

That she, who lived six thousand years ago,
Was made exactly like the best we know.

This idea of the primordial pair has been variously expressed. Dubufe, the Frenchman, whose two pictures of the Temptation and the Expulsion have been so extensively carried about and admired, represents Adam and Eve as a very fair and almost rose-colored pair of progenitors—as if they had just stepped out of band-boxes. Instead of resembling in aspect the old _intonsus Cato_, at a time when razors were unheard of, Adam wears his countenance smooth-shaven, while his dark hair and beard look as well dressed as if they had just come from the accomplishing hand of a barber. The toilet of the father of all men living seems, in fact, perfected as to the head; and he looks for all the world like a handsome French guardsman, _in puris naturalibus_. The genius of Gaul breathes from the whole representation, proving as strongly as the poetry of Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine, that though powerful in the picturesque, splendid and _grandiose_, it is still deficient in the finer and higher faculties of poetic inspiration. An Englishman has certainty made a far nobler picture of the human protoplast and his better half. John Milton says of Adam—

His fair, large front and eye sublime declared
Infinite rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad.

In both these instances the man seems to be of the Caucasian type—a European; for Milton’s portrait has an air of Greek dignity. Pritchard is of opinion that Adam was of a melanic skin—a black man, in fact—though not of course belonging to what we recognize as the African type. Indeed, it is difficult not to suppose the first man and woman beings of a swarthy complexion, to suit their skies—and nobly-faced, as the Afghans and other races of Central Asia are at this day. If we assume—as we are disposed to do—that the first pair were fashioned by miraculous initiative, we must conclude they would be physical, and, indeed, mental exemplars—of beautiful aspect and faultless symmetry. But the ardent oriental sun, and the glorious exposure of their persons to the elements, would naturally darken their complexions, and in this guise should they be represented by painting and poetry. “But whither would conjecture stray,” on such a theme as this?

Spreading out from their original locality, the various branches of the human family may be easily conceived to undergo changes from the climate and mode of life of their successive generations. That such changes were undergone seems to be borne out by the comparison or contrast of the different races. In some places, the people who traveled out of the temperate zone, or whose lot was cast in places far inland, and without rivers, where the powers of nature were niggard and the elements unfavorable, would become deteriorated, and the course of generations would confirm in them the growing inferiority of their condition—physical and mental. On the other hand, they whose lines were fallen to them in pleasant places, in a temperate zone, by the shores of seas, or banks of rivers, and in the midst of a country, fit either to feed cattle or to produce corn and wine, would keep their original dignity of feature and physical structure.

Thus, for instance, the first wanderers to the South and East would, in time, become the black Papuan races; and others, passing through Suez and Egypt into Africa Proper—so to term it—would become baked and brutified by the sun and the sandy wilderness. On the other hand, they who moved through the temperate zone under beneficent firmaments, and in Mesopotamian districts, would naturally become the Assyrian, Persian, Pelasgian builders of houses, ships, temples, great cities, and historical colonies. The tribes migrating up toward the North would, from the first, suffer from the Boreal elements, and take deep traces of them; but would also be endowed with great physical energy from the same, and under the Mongolian name, agitate all the North with powerful migrations, and, in the end, originate those world-overthrowing hordes, which filled subsequent ages with so much terror and glory. The earlier wanderers into Africa, passing inward and southward, would give rise to those marked and many-named tribes, classed under the nomenclature of Negroes. The hot sun, and the condition of their soil, would affect their physical nature. Every thing would tend, as we have still the opportunity of perceiving, to degrade the human type in the interior of Africa. The people would become mere animals without the stimulants of happier localities. They would bask lazily in the sun, crowd together in kraals, and propagate their degraded race into something still more stupid and degraded by the vitiating closeness of their intermarriages. In such circumstances of savagery, the dropping and thickness of the sensual mouth, and the other facial peculiarities would grow and become hardened features, in the course of time. It seems to be generally understood that the power of adaptation is a law of physical nature, as well in man as in the lower organizations; and it may very reasonably be concluded that the human head is modified by the powers of the brain—the energy of thought expanding the capacity of the head. This is the opinion of Mallebranche, and other philosophers and physiologists. We may conclude that the sensual stagnation of the intellectual faculties, under the tropical elements, where exertion of any kind could have but little effect in bettering the condition of a lazy population, leaves the brain to grow feeble and flaccid from disuse; whence it is not unphilosophical to conclude the fore part of the head would sink in, and lie toward the back. It seems to be a general physical law, that the expression of the face shall indicate the natures of men. The Arabs and other Asiatics arriving from the East into Egypt, and bringing on their firm faces the traces of their arduous circumstances and active habits, came, in the course of generations, to be marked with the sensuousness of mouth and chin, and the lower arch of the head which distinguish the Egyptian face. The hot and enervating climate of Egypt had a deteriorating effect on the population, which at last grew to resemble the Negro race. That the Egyptians were not so degraded in appearance as these last, was owing to the many immigrations of foreign tribes, who preserved to the kings, priests, and higher classes, a more Asiatic physical expression. The river Nile, the Sea—the great civilizer—and the influences of commerce, had also their beneficent effects upon the condition of the people of Egypt.

With regard to the other more marked races, it is known that the law of Northern latitudes is, the lessening of physical development and capacity, from the temperate toward the colder zones. In these last, the blood of men grows colder and more sluggish, and their bodies grow smaller and weaker. Extreme cold is unfriendly to the element of life; and under its influence, acting directly on man, and indirectly on his condition, from the soil, the Northern races received their stunted proportions of figure and mental energy—such as we witness in the Esquimaux and other tribes, of the same high latitudes.

We should not calculate the climatic effects of primitive times, from the result of experience or observation now-a-days. The conditions of men are not exactly what they were, even in those places we consider barbarous. In the beginning, men were ignorantly exposed to all the rude shocks of the elements for generations, and lived and propagated the conditions which those elements impressed upon them. All the deteriorating influences of savage life, working in a very vicious circle, effected then what can no longer be effected, in a general way, so decidedly and remarkably. People, now, can move about and live in extreme latitudes, and yet keep for generations their peculiar traits and conformation. But they have comfortable means and appliances about them, and hold themselves aloof from the barbarisms peculiar to the place. In this way, the climatic influences are resisted for ages.

Those who argue for a distinct species in the case of the blacks, and do not believe in the slow changes produced by geographical position and the elements, will point to the fact, that Negroes taken into temperate latitudes, and propagating purely for a few generations, have appeared to be Negroes still—not much the whiter for the experiment. But it has not been a full and a fair one. Nature produces her permanent results very slowly. She took hundreds of years to bake, and blacken and flatten, and lanify the nigger, and hundreds more to harden his osteology—to burn, as it were, his traits into his clay; and if the man is to be unbaked, unblackened, and so forth, she must have something of the same time, in which to reverse her operations. It would take four or five hundred years, at least, to bleach Pompey or Lucretia. Perhaps at Spitzbergen, or some of those hyperborean places—

Where the wild hare and the crow
Whiten in surrounding snow—

the process may be accelerated by a century or so. But, till some philosopher gets his pair of blacks, and sits fairly down to see the experiment out, we shall be of opinion that, centuries would be necessary to counteract the slow workmanship of nature in this business; but certainly, that at the end of that time, the whole human type would have suffered a perfect change, conformable to the latitude and longitude—the _locus in quo_. We repeat—those early effects of climate, tropical or boreal, were such as no elemental influence noted in modern times can give us any correct idea of. Ages and continents were the first premises and means, by and from which Nature stamped her human varieties in the first ages.

Coming from the physical and ethnical considerations, we see the influence of the material elements very perceptible, in the social, moral, and historical manifestations of the various races of the world. A consideration of the Asiatics, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and other nations of ancient or modern name, would make this evident. The Easterns inhabiting, in Central Asia, vast extents of level country, for the most part at a distance from the sea, were chiefly pastoral and nomadic. They had room to wander and grow, and be numbered by millions. Under such circumstances, they were naturally liable to be dominated by great commanders, to whom—seeing that their unsettled polity also included the principles of war and plunder—they would delegate the leadership; and who, on the broad _plateaux_, could make use of cavalry and chariots—those ready means of conquest and despotism in the old times. Hence the people fell numerously under the sway of a few kings, who used their power with the fierceness and irresponsibility of gods, and kept the soldiery and the masses in a state of slavery—whether following plunder, cultivating the soil, or making bricks from mud, and rearing with these, through sweating generations, those walls and towers of Central Asia—Nineveh, Babylon, and so forth—of which we have transmitted to us such vague and magnificent traditions, and of which Layard and others have been discovering some traces for us latterly.

It was the same way, nearly, in Egypt—that prominent historic feature of antiquity. The valley of the Nile was one level, isolated extent of unrivaled fertility—capable of supporting millions at the expense of no very heavy amount of agricultural toil. People necessarily multiplied there, and being of peaceful agrarian disposition, came, in time, to be subservient to the priests and Pharaohs of the land. The civilization of Egypt was a monstrous sort of thing, born of the sun and the sediment of the Nile, like the other monsters of that “Great river.” Relaxed and enervated by the heat of the climate, kept in ignorance, and employed in masses by the despotism of the country, the people became slavish laborers, husbandmen and manufacturers, living content, in a hot inland condition, unfreshened by any breeze of the civilizing sea, worshiping animals first used as hieroglyphical helps to language, and hating the idea of foreign invasion, ever associated in their minds and traditions with the revolution of the nomade shepherd kings. The stupendous architecture of Egypt, like that of Assyria, proved the numerical force, physical slavishness, and mental superstition of that people. Fattened by the _lætas segetes_—the exuberant harvests of the Nile—brute force and beaverism divided the nation between them—excepting what amount of esoteric knowledge the priests and kings made use of to keep the many-headed monster in order.

Let us now look at the aspects of Greece—a country, undoubtedly, peopled from the places and races of Central Asia. Greece is an irregular land of hills and valleys, broken by a thousand bays, and clasped, beneficently, in the serpent arms of the Midland Sea. In Greece are no broad levels on which a despot may deploy his horsemen and war-chariots. Marathon, to be sure, is a plateau, looked on by the mountains, and looking on the sea—

The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea—

but history tells us that the Persian cavalry found it far too rugged a place to charge upon. Neither had Hellas any fat, broad extent of soil on which maize, rice, and corn may grow, to feed millions in a supine content, and predispose them to be the instruments of some powerful despotism, kingly or priestly. The climate of Greece was varied by the inequalities of its surface and the nearness of the sea; and the inhabitants became a pastoral, agricultural, and commercial people. The soil brought forth, in reward of care and labor, corn, and wine, and oil, and vegetation of great beauty and grandeur. The climate was marked by those vicissitudes which the experience of the world proves to be most favorable to the condition of man, and the highest development of his powers. It had none of the inland and enervating characteristics of Middle Asia or Egypt. The Greek was obliged to wrestle with Nature for her blessings. Thence rose, in time, the illustrious polities, the immortal mythologies, and white theories of her fields and streams—all that memorable splendor of intellect and war which has had nothing comparable to it in antiquity.

The geography of Greece forbade that deadly centralization which has so disastrously weighed upon most other civilizations. Nature divided the Hellenic land into states—fashioned the Greek group of peoples on the federal principle. The results were that the distinct races and families of men set about taking care of their own destinies—began to make their municipal arrangements, and lift up their ideas to the great argument of self-government. Each nationality was small enough to be within the ken and influence of all its citizens. Every man in the state—slaves excepted—had an intimate personal interest in its welfare—the people were all politicians or soldiers, and could be statesmen—if necessary. Their minds were thus nursed in independence—educated in the true school of civil liberty; and, even in monarchies as well as republics, the power, intelligence, and influence of the people, constituted the life and vigor of the state. The warlike and religious games of Greece perfected the strength and symmetry of the human body. Its climate and soil were eminently calculated to produce happy results on the minds of men so organized and educated; and the national character became reflected in the graceful arts and superstitions of the people. In the East and Egypt, the vague idea of some supreme divinity, which hovered over all nations from the beginning, and never seems to have been absent from the world, was degraded by the degraded souls of the people. Their notions of supernal things were monstrous, grotesque, and inhuman—gathered evidently from their experience of kings and crocodiles. To express them the slavish race accepted the shapes of birds and beasts—winged bulls, cows, cats, hawks, alligators, and so forth. How different the cheerful and eminently human mythologies of Greece, born of the elements of the clime—autochthonous of that immortal ground! The Orientals, Egyptians, etc., bowed down to brutal shapes, congenial with the gross conceptions of their own laborious ignorance. But the Greek looked up, with a dignified sense of things—admired his own splendid symmetry in the olympic festivals, and, with a glorious egotism, invested the many manifestations of the universal spirit with the finest forms of men that ran or fought naked in the _palestræ_. Pan was no monstrous deity—he was a jolly rustic divinity—of the earth, earthy—a bucolic _bizarrerie_, coming naturally from the gay, gross genius of agrarianism; a little _caper_-footed, to be sure; but therefore only the more in character, and a very respectable divinity, indeed, for the country parts.

Berenger, the French poet, fables that it was Cyprus wine which first gave birth to the gods of Greece—stating that Hesiod had warmed his veins with the liquor before he began to embody his Olympian theories. But Hesiod, after all, only transcribed and touched up the popular belief; it was the bright, sensuous genius of Greece, transfiguring the happy elements of the clime, that brought forth the theogonies—peopled with immortal dwellers the

Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes,
Beyond heaven’s constellated wilderness.

The Greeks deified the best attributes of mankind, and adored the Supreme Spirit in the reflections of their own cheerful and elevated minds. In the vastness and power of the sea they saw Poseidon on his car, drawn by sea-horses, and girt by his conch-bearing Tritons, sounding in response to what the old Greek dramatist calls “the innumerable laughter of the waves”—_anarithmon kymaton gelasma_—Jupiter thundered from the acroceraunian top of Olympus,

Soaring all snow-clad through his native sky
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty;

Phœbus-Apollo and Diana, his sister, moved, beautiful unspeakably, in the sun and moon; gods blew in the four great winds and in the breeze; every fountain had its Naiad, and every oak its Hamadryad. Pan shouted on the mountains—especially whenever good came to Greece; and on the day of Marathon his mighty vociferations were heard at wonderful distances!—and the Fauns, Satyrs, Dryads, Oreads and so forth, his subjects and followers, wandered over every meadow, and were seen peeping from the glades and openings of every forest.

Much of the power and civilization of Greece grew from her commerce and maritime enterprise—from the sea. Dr. Arnold, the historian, says very truly, that the sea has always been one of the greatest agents of liberty and civilization. The supremacy of Athens over Sparta, then, and in the memory of all future time, was due to the port of the Piræus. The crowning glories of the Attic metropolis—her immortal sculptures and temples and her splendid philosophies—were owing to a refining intercourse with other peoples, and to the maritime exactions, somewhat tyrannically levied from those sea-born states that, from the waters and shores of the Mediterranean, looked to Athens as their mother city and protectress. Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse and other seaports—ancient and modern—have owed their wealth, celebrity and distinguishing character to their respective geographical positions.

If we follow the movements of the human family through Germany and up to the high latitudes of Europe, we find that the severe elements of the north and the peculiarities of soil were able to imbue the human mind with a portion of their own character. The life of the great Scandinavian race was necessarily divided between war and plunder; and the ideas which they entertained of the superior powers and a future state were reflected from their circumstances. These corsairs and kempions believed the Valhalla of departed spirits was a place where the happy warriors fought one another during the day, and feasted together at night, (eating flesh and drinking mead from deer’s horns) after Odin had miraculously put together the severed limbs and healed all the wounds; till the morrow should once more renew these murdering beatitudes of the boreal heaven! Again—the iron hills of the Northern region helped to form the mythologies and superstitions originally so distinctive of the Scandinavian mind. The Lapps, Finns, and other peoples of the high latitudes, were in a great measure miners and smiths. Æschylus, we believe it is, who says that the sword is “the child of Scythia”—a saying not more figurative than matter-of-fact. Jornades, a Goth, says Scandinavia was the Forge of Mankind—_humani generis officium_—indicating the metallurgic nature of that influence exerted on the fate of the more Southern European nations. The men who mined, and who hammered into shape the swords of the Northmen, were small in their physical proportions, and usually had their stithies near the mouths of the mines among the hills. Hence the kobold-workers, the hill-folk, the goblins, trolls, dwarfs, wee men and so forth, of a superstition which has overflowed the rest of Europe, almost as extensively as the military migrations from the same places did, once upon a time. These little hyperborean _diableries_ have wandered all over the fields of the South and permanently tinged the currents of its various literature.

Turning to Asia, we perceive how the relaxing heat of the climate led the mild and perspiring Hindoo to regard God as a being who sits still and reposes—a type of sublime steadfastness and languor. If Christianity had been born in the middle of Europe, the history of society would probably have wanted some of its most curious and remarkable features—monasteries and hermitages. In the East, enthusiasts, overpowered by the heat, naturally agreed that thinking and doing nothing would be a great help to devotional feeling. So the pious were led to go very much together into cool crypts, and, from the physical sensations of the East, gave rise to a philosophy which having passed into the colder climates, became naturally identified with more of penance and endurance. The Koran would not have been written—could not have done its work, in any Northern latitude. It is as much a part of the East—of south-western Asia—as if it was a date or a palm tree, and grew near a well in the desert. One of the sublimest religious duties among the Brahmins and Turks is said to be, to sit on the floor, with the eye of the mind fixed on the very centre of the midriff, and thus expect the growth and efflorescence of sanctity—a much pleasanter way of coming at the result, than by walking or taking any violent exercise, where the thermometer is usually up to 95 in the shade! It is also a part of religion in these hot latitudes to wash one’s self—a piece of piety which is good enough to be Christian. The Arab is free, because no one cares to dispute his sands with him; and hospitable, because without hospitality his dusty father-land would be nearly impassable or uninhabitable. Montesquieu says that poor and barbarous nations are most hospitable, and trading nations least so; for which moral effects there could be adduced very good geographical causes.

Regarding Asia, on the whole, we perceive its great inferiority to Europe in every thing which civilization boasts of. For the causes of this we must look to the circumstances of sun and soil—the latter, especially. Europe, unlike Asia, is broken into many distinct territories by mountain chains, seas, straits, rivers, etc. Nature, in laying out portions of her domain, as it were, prepared those divisions, segregations, and isolations which fostered national independence, and left to the European families of men leisure to entertain the more humanizing and elevating thoughts of life. Europe became crowded with nationalities in which the federal principle grew up, perilously shaken by blows, to be sure, and nourished with human gore, but still struggling forward; by degrees, into more assured vitality; while flowing around and through all, the civilizing sea with its breezes fanned into strength the warm blood in the arteries of enterprise, toil and progress. The Asian continent, on the contrary, is comparatively a vast, unwatered, sun-baked extent of solid ground, open, for the most part, to the wild winds and the wilder hordes of barbarians and semi-barbarians. If, by some convulsion of Nature, the Caspian Sea could have been widened and prolonged eastward for fifteen hundred miles or so, the history of Asia, and, perhaps, of the world, would certainly have been different from that we now peruse.

Freedom and national prosperity are hard to locate. They have never seemed to thrive, as yet, (we don’t know how it may be in the future) in the soft and sunny places of the world. They require hard conditions of the sun and soil to bring them to a valid and permanent state of existence. They seem to have succeeded best in presence of a difficulty—proving apparently, the truth of the saying, that the price of independence is eternal vigilance. The perfection of the human race belongs to the temperate zones and to the necessity of energy imposed by their elemental conditions. The civilization of warm, fertile, spontaneous countries is not that by which the progress of the world is accelerated. Switzerland has been kept free by her barren ground and her keen winds, which have invigorated the souls of her people; and they have also, probably, dissuaded the ambition of her neighbors. But it is certain that she has shown herself courageous and determined to be free. The Hollowland, south of the Baltic, lying half in the ocean, and subject to its overflows, was not very vehemently regarded by the rulers of men, and therefore, for a long time, served as a refuge for the peaceful and industrious. Labor built up their energies in that place, and their spirit of independence along with the dykes, and they at last learned to love and die for “their new-catched miles” taken from under the trident of Poseidon; and so they made that land the asylum of liberty, toleration, enlightenment and commercial prosperity. Venice, China, and other states in which labor and vigilance have been necessary to cope with certain difficulties of the soil or situation, are further proofs of this influence of climate on national character.

If we look to England—we think it could be shown that all she is—all that contrasts in her so strongly with the condition of other European nations, has been owing to her place on the map. Beneath a variable sky, the soil, which would yield little spontaneously, was still rich enough to reward cultivation; and so the Anglo-Saxons—not to go further back—became agricultural and accustomed to toil. Their tribes, occupying a series of independent localities, after a primitive fashion, were necessarily accustomed to look to their own plow-lands, hundreds, parishes and counties, and regulate them independently. The space of the island was too small to permit any nomade movements; and when it was brought to acknowledge a common ruler, the parish and county regulations were in customary force. The agricultural and household fixity of the people allowed them to form regular habits and ideas of policy. The circumstances of the island did not encourage any central despotism to grow up in it like that of Charlemagne over France and Europe. Girt by the waters of the four seas, the Saxon polity had time to grow hardened on the soil, so that the invasions of the Danes and the Normans had no power to do away with it. The Norman government, imposed for centuries on the island, grew-weak in time before the well-rooted Anglo-Saxonism of the land; the early county representatives flowered at last into the Parliament, and the _folkmotes_ of Egbert and the Confessor are, at this day, flourishing bravely and remarkably on wide-severed hemispheres of the globe.

The isolation of England preserved her from the despotic influences of the continent. But for her separating sea, she would have been many times overrun by her neighbors. If she had touched the bounds of France or the Low Countries, she might have passed under the French crown in the reign of King John, or she would have been overrun by the terrible Spanish infantry—a _land_ armada—in the days of Philip; or would have had Napoleon, in 1804, dating his European decrees from the brick-built palace of St. James’. The ocean gods that have been the friends of Great Britain, have vindicated the truth of Dr. Arnold’s assertion—in fostering a maritime wealth and empire, of which no former example has at any time existed in the world, and which will only be exceeded when the Anglo-Saxonism which is the moral back-bone of this continent—obeying the unexpired old insular impulse of the slow gathering years long before the Mayflower floated—shall spread out a broader breadth of canvas to all the winds of Heaven—a more Briarean strength of arm over the seas and shores of the world.

It would be absurd to deny, we repeat, that other influences beside those of climate and soil operate upon peoples. Accidents, of conquests, great men, modes of government, religions—these mould the life and character of nations. But, as far as the world has yet gone, we must perceive the more radical and permanent power of the elemental and local influences. We see that nations keep their peculiar character, through the long period of progress, for a thousand years together. The Germans seem to be the same with those Teutonic tribes described by Cæsar and Tacitus. The former described the French of to-day in the Gauls of his own time. He says that nowhere were the common people more despised and kept down than in the country of the Gauls. The Italians of this century are certainly those of the ancient Roman days. If we desire to find a parallel for that general supineness and helplessness which, they exhibit just now, we shall find them under the emperors, from Augustus down, when the old warlike spirit of the people seemed to have entirely evaporated; and if we desire to find something like the heroism which drove Brennus back to the mountains and refused to despair after Cannae, we may discover it in the revolution and siege of Rome in 1848 and 1849. The “human plant” in Italy appears at all times to belong to the soil and the sun: capable of heroic things after “the high Roman fashion;” also wonderfully content with maccaroni and the basking _dolce far niente_, which, being interpreted, is the _panem et circensis_ of those times when Rome was mistress of the world; and as handy with the stiletto as once, upon those historic Ides of March, when the blood of Cæsar

Came rushing out of doors to be resolved
If Brutus so unkindly knocked or no.

In the same way could be traced old resemblances in the features of many other modern nations—surviving time and change, and, apparently, proving the truth of the autocthonous principle.

Coming to ourselves—we also exhibit the influence of climate on character. And first, as to physical character, in which this proposition seems least controvertible. The Americans, are found to be less robust than their European forefathers—English, Irish, German, French, Spanish, and others. The citizens of this republic are, generally speaking, a thinner and paler race than the peoples of the old world. This fact is the more striking, that the condition of immigrants is customarily improved on this soil—they eat and drink better, and have more of the physical comforts of life. Philosophers have been endeavoring to account for this. Some maintain there is something in the climate of America which will not permit organized beings to possess the fire and vigor of the animal creation of the other hemisphere. The dogs of this community are found not to have at all the ferocity of the European hounds: and the American cock does not keep up the high, military heart of his insular brother over the way. It has been considered that to the greater moisture of the British Isles (it is chiefly to these we confine our contrast—seeing they furnish us with the chief material for making it) is owing the superior freshness of complexion and roundness of form which distinguish the insulars. The air of this continent is far dryer than that of the United Kingdom. Another cause has been found in the astonishing haste in which Americans live and move and have their being—their incessant play of speculative thought: and especially the rapid way in which they furnish the microcosm with its necessary aliment—or, as Mr. Micawber would say, with a burst of confidence —bolt their victuals, in fact. Other causes have been found in the general use of stoves in houses, and the consumption of acidulating fruit in this country. Certainly the health of American women, in particular, suffers from these two causes in a very palpable manner. The stoves of anthracitic America, vitiating the air of close rooms and relaxing the powers of the human body, are calculated to produce a great difference of some sort or other between our people—the women especially—and those islanders who use bituminous coal and open grates. All these things, of course, produce their results; but we think the chief cause of this effect—“or of this defect; for this effect defective comes by cause,” as old Polonius would say—would seem to exist in the atmosphere; inasmuch as the lower animal creation on this continent is also found inferior to that of Europe in a certain amount of physical stamina.

As regards the mental and moral character of our people, it could be fairly shown that among all the influences affecting it, those of sun and soil are radically the most forcible. The vast and varied resources of our territory have made us a nation of energetic workers and traders. The lower faculties of our minds have been so excited by the prospects and opportunities which commerce has displayed and discovered to us, on all sides, that the rest of these faculties, in sight of such a wonderful business and the great ends to which it is tending, engage also in the excitement, and Science, Art, Poetry, Philosophy, Religion even, move down gladly to join the great and manifold march of our destinies. Whatever amount of social greatness, enterprise and far speculation distinguishes us from the other nations, is certainly owing to our continental place upon the surface of the globe—this moral _pou sto_, whence we may yet be enabled to move the whole world in a variety of ways. Our minds seem to grow to the measure of this territory, and to represent, in its capacities, the material resources of the empire in all their affluence and incompleteness.

Science and general intercourse will, doubtless, do a great deal in time, in the way of obliterating nations’ distinctives. But these can never wholly pass away before the moral advances of civilization. In the human economy, in fact, it would seem that the principle of variety which we find at work every where in the universe, is just as necessary and good as in the material scheme of things. Man must always, more or less, bear the character of those elements by which he is surrounded.

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[1] Natural History of the Human Species; by Lieut. Col. C. H. Smith. Reprint, Boston. Gould & Kendall.

* * * * *

=SONG.=

=BY WM. H. C. HOSMER.=

Music; where soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory. Shelley.

She knew me not, although her breast
Had pillowed oft my head,
And thought I long had been at rest
With Ocean’s ghostly dead.
Full on my wan and wasted face
She fixed her melancholy gaze;
But there, alas! she could not trace
The look of other days.

She knew me not! the flight of time
An iron form will bow,
And bondage in a tropic clime
Had darkened cheek and brow:
I spoke of friends; with look cast down,
Who shared her joy in better hours—
Whom Death had added to his crown
Of darkly folded flowers:—