mate, and of every variety of complexion: African negroes, Caffres, Javans, Chinese, Hindus, Persians, Armenians, Malays, Cingalese, Malabars, Arabs, Moors, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and every shade of half-castes. They all enjoy health, which is, of itself, almost sufficient to prove that health does not depend upon parallels of latitude. The human frame is, in fact, alike adapted to equatorial heat and Arctic cold the chief precaution required, therefore, in founding colonies, is to avoid situations where heat is accompanied by moisture. : In regard to virtue, too. If, in a particular country, one order of men is found capable of exercising the highest benevolence, why may not the people generally of that country do the same? Every species of crime is committed in India, yet the Parsee merchants of Bombay exceed all the merchants in the world for active benevolence and philanthropy. This character was first given them by Ovington, and it has been attested by almost every traveller since. In a country exhibiting such a frightful dissoluteness of morals, it refreshes the soul to read of their virtues ! : Climate has undoubtedly a great effect on the complexion thus Europeans are white, the Arabs, Persians, and Chinese brown, the East Indians copper-coloured, and the Javans yellow. The Moors are swarthy; the Africans, under the line, black; and the natives of New South Wales of a dark chocolate. Still in America it is otherwise; the natives of that vast continent being, with small diversity of shades, of a red copper colour, from north to south, and from east to west. The Esquimaux, who freezes near the arctic pole; the Western Indian, who sleeps upon leaves, and has the woods for his canopy; the natives on the Oronoco, who burn between the tropics; the Peruvian, who sees the sun set behind the Cordilleras; and the Brazilian, who beholds it rising out of the bosom of the Atlan tic, all bear the stamp of one original. The American Indians are remarkable, too, for the thickness of their skins and the hardness of their fibres : hence their comparative insensibility to bodily pain. They are distinguished, also, by a classical symmetry of figure. Indeed, so beautiful are their forms, that when the celebrated American painter West saw the Apollo Belvidere at Rome, so struck was he with the resemblance that he instantly exclaimed, "How like a young Mohawk warrior!" The Italians were not a little mortified at the comparison; but, upon the painter's describing the elasticity of their limbs, their dexterity in the use of the bow, and their indications of conscious vigour; and when he assured them that he had often seen these standing in the very, attitude of the Apollo, with their eye following the arrow just discharged from the bow, they became reconciled to the exclamation of the painter, and felt the value of the criticism. If we travel the globe from east to west, and from south to north, noticing every variety of climate, we shall find that in countries the most beautiful, as well as in the most savage and forlorn, great crimes disgrace the inhabitants. Warm climates dispose to indolence, cold ones to labour. In some islands, where Nature is the most luxuriant and profuse, we observe not only no genius, but no humanity, whether those islands are in the temperate or torrid zones. There are everywhere differences in manners, and modifications in the display of mental capacity; but for the cause of these we must look to something else than diversity of climate. For whence is it that in Persia and Arabia poetry is almost characteristic of the inhabitants: and yet in Egypt, nearly in the same parallel of latitude, and among the oldest of nations, not a single poet has ever been known. Then as to times and seasons: Orpheus lived in the infancy, as it were, of the human mind; Euripides in the prime of Grecian literature; Virgil in the morning of Roman slavery; Boëthius in the evening of learning; Dante in the darkness of violence and superstition; and Camoëns in the dawn of maritime discovery. Genius depends, then, not on climates or countries, on times or seasons: it nowhere rises or falls with the barometer. It is the gift of Nature only, and its developments depend on an infinite variety of circumstances. Arguing on the principles of Montesquieu, Raynal, Winkelman, Du Bos, and other plausible writers, it would be impossible to account for the diversity so distinctly observable in the dispositions, habits, and genius of people living on the opposite banks of frontier rivers; on the two sides of high mountains; and particularly of the same people at different periods of their history. Of this the ancient and the modern Greeks afford a striking exemplification. Both lived on the same soil and in the same climate, and yet how immense the difference between them.* CHARACTERS AND HABITS OF ANIMALS. It is curious to observe the peculiarities of animals in respect to their form, capabilities, manners, and habits. Let us notice a few of these. Wild horses live in communities, consisting of from ten to twenty, in the deserts of Western Tartary and in the southern regions of Siberia, each community *This reminds us of a passage in Theophrastus: "I have often wondered," says he, in his Proem to the Characteristics, written in the ninety first year of his age, "and perhaps shall never cease to wonder, how it comes to pass that there should be so great a diversity in our manners, since all Greece lies under the same air, and all its inhabitants receive a like education." Theophrastus was mistaken: the inhabitants of the dif ferent Greek states had by no means the same education; and hence the phenomena which so much excited his astonishment. being governed by a chief. When a male arrives at maturity, he is chased from the herd, and wanders about till he has assembled a few females, to establish an empire of his own. While feeding or sleeping they place a sentinel to keep watch, and on the approach of danger he gives the alarm by neighing, when the whole party set off with a speed that outstrips the wind. Wild asses congregate in the same manner; and antelopes associate together in bodies, frequently to the number of three thousand. The wild lamas of the Cordilleras live together also in large bodies, and station sentinels upon the summit of some neighbouring precipice. The Arctic walrus sleeps likewise in company with others, to the number of several hundreds, on the islands of ice along the coast of Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla, Hudson's Bay, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the Icy Sea. Ursine seals, too, are gregarious, each family consisting of from ten to fifty females, besides their young, commanded by the father, who exercises despotic authority. Violet crabs live in communities among the mountains of the Caribbee Islands, whence they emigrate in immense bodies every year to the seashore to deposite their eggs. Green turtles are also gregarious. On shore they prefer the mangrove and the black-wood tree; but in the sea they feed upon weeds, as land animals do upon grass. When the sun shines they may be seen, many fathoms deep, feeding in flocks, like deer. Bees, wasps, and ants congregate together in a manner still more wonderful. In some animals we observe a propensity to hoard for the satisfaction of the next day's appetite, in others for the entire winter's supply. The latter instinct is possessed by the beaver, the striped dormouse, the earless marmot, and the Alpine mole. There are birds, too, which have the same foresight, as the nuthatch and the tanager of the Mississippi: the former storing up nuts, the latter maize. Some birds there are which take pleasure in hoarding what can be of no use to them, as the raven, the jackdaw, the magpie, and the nut-cracker of Lorraine. Some quadrupeds assimilate in the custom of sleeping by day and being active by night, as the Egyptian jerboa, the wandering mouse, the hedgehog, the six-banded armadillo, the great anteater, the tapir, the Brazilian porcupine, the flying squirrel of North and South America, and the hippopotamus of the Nile and the Niger. This curious propensity is observed also among certain birds, insects, and fishes, as the owl, the finch of Hudson's Bay, the whitethroat, the goat-sucker, the eel, the turtle, and the moth. With these we may associate those flowers which expand their blossoms during the evening and the night, as the Pomeridian pink, nocturnal catchfly, several species of moss, the nightshade of Peru, the nightingale flower of the Cape, the cereus grandiflorus, and the tree of melancholy growing in the Moluccas; the numerous family of the confervæ, charas, many kinds of ranunculi, and almost every species of aquatic plant. So, also, many beautiful flowers have no scent, while many beautiful birds have no song, and many animals of symmetrical shapes are of no use to mankind. Some plants will exist for months without water: serpents are equally abstinent; and sloths will exist forty days without any kind of food. Few animals require habitations, they being sufficiently protected by their wool, hair, or scales. The soldier-crab, however, shelters himself in the discarded shell of the lobster. On the banks of the Congo, the African ants erect mushroom-like habitations, sometimes forming whole villages.. vers show more intelligence in regard to their security than any other animal; and not only build in a manner more consonant with reason than the sav Bea |