Part 2 — THOUGHTS ON THE THERMOMETER.

Climate is said to have much influence on the physical, moral, mental, political and social condition of mankind. Experience and observation certainly give force to such an opinion. The difference in manners, customs and character of the Russ and the Italian is as much owing to latitude as lineality. One’s happiness, and even one’s destiny in life, depend alike on Seasons and on Self.

The iron constitution, the sharp wit, the keen sense, the peculiar individuality, the guessing and bartering of the man of Maine, contrasts with the singing, siesta-seeking, music-loving, rich intellectuality of the Mexican of the hacienda. Even in religious sentiment the difference is striking. Look upon the cold, austere meeting-house worship of the Puritan, and side by side behold the rich, voluptuous cathedral service of the Catholic. These at least indicate the extremes of the influence of the climate. The whole physical, mental and moral constitution of man is operated upon by the temperature of his location, and thus affecting not only his individual existence but the ultimate condition of his race.

What would have been the fate of “The Colonists” of the “May-Flower” had they landed at San Francisco or St. Domingo? If instead of the stern, bracing, labor-requiring, excess-denying latitude of Plymouth, the Pilgrims had rested in the land of the palmetto and the pomegranate? Or who would have ventured on an unknown ocean, in search for a new world, if the hope, the imagination, the enthusiasm, the poetry, the mental excitement, the superstition even of Columbus, the child of the South, had sunk in despair, or yielded to first disappointment? Where would the close calculation of the North, founded on a philosophical hypothesis, have sought for continued animation, after error has resulted from experiment?

Where would the literature of the Past have found admirers, and even devotees, if the mythology of the East had not been nursed in the soft lap of a congenial temperature?

Why is it that the Latin classics yet hold a place as familiar as household words, if a Southern sky had not invited to the rich developments of the highest mental creations?

Where could the painter and sculptor have sought models and studies, if the winter of the Mediterranean had been as relentless and as rigid as that of Moscow?

Can it be maintained that Solon and Lycurgus would have alike given their fame in trust to immortality, if the genial influences of the land of their nativity had not been the same “at Rome as it was at Attica”?

Who will venture to assert that a similar fate would have followed the siege of Troy in a land of snows, or that Marathon would have been a northern Moscow?

Science, too, has felt the force of the benefit of its more northern home. With a temperature unshocked by extremes, the highest mental industry yields more, or rather different, fruit than the richest intellectual soil. The wheat and the corn of the necessaries to progress, are gathered only where the wine and the oil of luxury do not grow.

That Tyre and Sidon were marts for the cosmopolite, and now are but the refuge for the wanderer, while Boston, New York, New Orleans were the seaboards of the savage, and are now the emporiums of a hemisphere, is as true as that the causes are to be found in some degree dependent upon the influences of climate.

That Rome was the mother of nations, the terror of thrones, and the great entrance into eternity, and now is the dismantled wreck of her illustrious past—while the hunting-grounds of the “Six Nations” are transformed into a mighty empire, is but the melancholy picture of the past, gorgeous in its dilapidation, under the luxurious warmth of an Italian sky, while the other is the picture of the present, more magnificent and vigorous, tinted by the rays of a western sun.

Climate was not alone in producing these changes, yet its influence was potent.

The Religion of Nazareth took its metaphors from the land of Aristotle, its enthusiasm from the nations on the “seacoast,” its energy from the Northmen, but its divinity from God!

The songs of labor are heard loudest and sweetest where the valley and forest yield an annual tribute over the grave of all that is beautiful, born of the spring; while the songs of the sentiments take their melodies from the land of soft sunlight, scented with perennial perfumes.

In considering the Future let us look at the Past, and among the most remarkable of physical causes which have marked their existence on the history of nations and of men, climate will be found to have exercised by no means an inconsiderable influence.