It is certain that the sun and atmosphere mark their empire on all the productions of nature, from man to mushrooms. In the grand age of Louis XIV., the ingenious Fontenelle remarked:

“One might imagine that the torrid and two frigid zones are not well suited to the sciences. Down to the present day they have not travelled beyond Egypt and Mauritania, on the one side, nor on the other beyond Sweden. Perhaps it is not owing to mere chance that they are retained within Mount Atlas and the Baltic Sea. We know not whether these may not be the limits appointed to them by nature, or whether we may ever hope to see great authors among Laplanders or negroes.”

Chardin, one of those travellers who reason and investigate, goes still further than Fontenelle, when speaking of Persia. “The temperature of warm climates,” says he, “enervates the mind as well as the body, and dissipates that fire which the imagination requires for invention. In such climates men are incapable of the long studies and intense application which are necessary to the production of first-rate works in the liberal and mechanic arts,” etc.

Chardin did not consider that Sadi and Lokman were Persians. He did not recollect that Archimedes belonged to Sicily, where the heat is greater than in three-fourths of Persia. He forgot that Pythagoras formerly taught geometry to the Brahmins. The Abbé Dubos supported and developed, as well as he was able, the opinion of Chardin.

One hundred and fifty years before them, Bodin made it the foundation of his system in his “Republic,” and in his “Method of History”; he asserts that the influence of climate is the principle both of the government and the religion of nations. Diodorus of Sicily was of the same opinion long before Bodin.

The author of the “Spirit of Laws,” without quoting any authority, carried this idea farther than Chardin and Bodin. A certain part of the nation believed him to have first suggested it, and imputed it to him as a crime. This was quite in character with that part of the nation alluded to. There are everywhere men who possess more zeal than understanding.

We might ask those who maintain that climate does everything, why the Emperor Julian, in his “Misopogon,” says that what pleased him in the Parisians was the gravity of their characters and the severity of their manners; and why these Parisians, without the slightest change of climate, are now like playful children, at whom the government punishes and smiles at the same moment, and who themselves, the moment after, also smile and sing lampoons upon their masters.

Why are the Egyptians, who are described as having been still more grave than the Parisians, at present the most lazy, frivolous, and cowardly of people, after having, as we are told, conquered the whole world for their pleasure, under a king called Sesostris? Why are there no longer Anacreons, Aristotles, or Zeuxises at Athens? Whence comes it that Rome, instead of its Ciceros, Catos, and Livys, has merely citizens who dare not speak their minds, and a brutalized populace, whose supreme happiness consists in having oil cheap, and in gazing at processions?

Cicero, in his letters, is occasionally very jocular on the English. He desires his brother Quintus, C?sar’s lieutenant, to inform him whether he has found any great philosophers among them, in his expedition to Britain. He little suspected that that country would one day produce mathematicians whom he could not understand. Yet the climate has not at all changed, and the sky of London is as cloudy now as it was then.

Everything changes, both in bodies and minds, by time. Perhaps the Americans will in some future period cross the sea to instruct Europeans in the arts. Climate has some influence, government a hundred times more; religion and government combined more still.
Influence of Climate.

Climate influences religion in respect to ceremonies and usages. A legislator could have experienced no difficulty in inducing the Indians to bathe in the Ganges at certain appearances of the moon; it is a high gratification to them. Had any one proposed a like bath to the people who inhabit the banks of the Dwina, near Archangel, he would have been stoned. Forbid pork to an Arab, who after eating this species of animal food (the most miserable and disgusting in his own country) would be affected by leprosy, he will obey you with joy; prohibit it to a Westphalian, and he will be tempted to knock you down. Abstinence from wine is a good precept of religion in Arabia, where orange, citron, and lemon waters are necessary to health. Mahomet would not have forbidden wine in Switzerland, especially before going to battle.

There are usages merely fanciful. Why did the priests of Egypt devise circumcision? It was not for the sake of health. Cambyses, who treated as they deserved both them and their bull Apis, the courtiers of Cambyses, and his soldiers, enjoyed perfectly good health without such mutilation. Climate has no pecu............