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"If climate operates extensively upon the actions of human beings, it is principally their amusements that are regulated by proximity to the tropics. Dancing might be called the principal amusement of both sexes, in Louisiana. Beholding the airy sweep of a Creole dance, the length of time that an assembly will preserve in the sport, at any season of the year, cold or warm, indolence would be the last charge that candour could lodge against such a people."

"Copying from Montesquieu," elsewhere says Mr. Darby, himself a slaveholder, "climate has been called upon to account for stains on the human character, imprinted by the hand of political mistake. No country where Negro Slavery is established but must have parts in the wounds committed on nature and justice."

The unacclimated whites on the sea coast and on the river and bayou banks of the low country, between which and the sea coast there is much inter-communication, unquestionably suffer much from certain epidemic, contagious, and infectious pestilences. This, however, only renders the fact that dense settlements of whites have been firmly established upon them, and that they are remarkably exempt from miasmatic disease, one of more value in evidence of the practicability of white occupation of the upper bottom lands. There are grounds for doubting the common opinion that the negroes at the South suffer less from local causes of disease than whites. (See