Effects of Climate

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 5, 1865

Effects of Climate

"Effects of Climate."—Wilkinson, in that unique and most admirable work, 'The Human Body and its Connection with Man,' thus characterizes some of the effects of climate upon the human features: 'The inhabitants of the regions of gusty winds have weather-beaten faces and lines as of the tempests blown howling into their skins. Mountain races have stony or granitic features, as of rocks abandoned to the barren air. The people of moist and marshy places look watery and lymphatic. Those where extremes of temperature prevail for long periods are leathern and shriveled, as though their skins had given up the contest with Nature, and died upon their faces.'—Am. Phren. Jour.

Is it not on the above hypothesis also by which we are to account for all the physiological phases we behold among the human species,—as size, stature, complexion, &c.? Have not climate, diet, and the ordinary habits of life, wrought out these varied physiological differences? This is what ethnologists generally suppose. G.