Page:The Native Races of the Pacific States, volume 2.djvu/72

54 Thus, that California and many other parts of North America could not have been the seat of a primitive civilization, cannot be proved upon the basis of any physical hypothesis; and, indeed, in our attempt to elucidate the principles of universal progress, where the mysterious and antagonistic activities of humanity have been fermenting all unseen for thousands of ages, unknown and unknowable, among peoples of whom our utmost knowledge can be only such as is derived from a transient glimpse of a disappearing race, it is with the utmost difficulty that satisfactory conclusions can in any instance be reached.

It is in a temperate climate, therefore, that man attains the highest development. On the peninsulas of Greece and Italy, where the Mediterranean invites intercourse; in Iran and Armenia, where the climate is cold enough to stimulate labor, but not so cold as to require the use of all the energies of body and mind in order to acquire a bare subsistence; warm enough to make leisure possible, but not so warm as to enervate and prostrate the faculties; with a soil of sufficient fertility to yield a surplus and promote the accumulation of wealth, without producing such a redundancy of vegetation as to be unmanageable by unskilled, primitive man—there it is that we find the highest intellectual culture.

It sometimes happens that, in those climates which are too vigorous for the unfolding of the tender germ, cultivation is stimulated into greater activity than in its original seats. It sometimes happens that, when the shell of savagism is once fairly broken, a people may overcome a domineering vegetation, and flourish in a climate where by no possibility could their development have originated. Even in the frozen regions of the north, as in Scandinavia, man, by the intensity of his nature, was enabled to surmount the difficulties of climate and attain a fierce, rude cultivation. The regions of Northern Europe and Northern America, notwithstanding their original opposition to man,