Cotton is cultivated to latitude 40 in the new world, but extends to Astrachan in latitude 46 in the old. The sugar cane, the plantain, the mulberry, the betel nut, the indigo tree, the tea tree, repay the labours of the cultivator in India and China; and several of these plants have been transferred, with success, to America and the West Indies. In equinoctial America a great number of inhabitants find abundant nourishment on a narrow space cultivated with plantain, cassava yams, and maize. The bread fruit tree begins to be cultivated in the Manillas, and extends through the Pacific; the sago palm in the Moluccas, the cabbage tree in the Pelew islands. In this manner the various tribes of men are provided with vegetable food. Some however live on their cattle, and thus make the produce of the earth only mediately subservient to their wants. Thus the Tartar tribes depend on their flocks and herds for food: the taste for the flesh of the horse seems to belong to the Mongols, Fins, and other descendants of the ancient Scythians: the locust eaters are found now, as formerly, in Africa. Many of these differences depend upon custom, soil, and other causes with which we do not here meddle; but many are connected with climate: and the variety of the resources which man thus possesses, arises from the variety of constitution belonging to cultivable vegetables, through which one is fitted to one range of climate, and another to another. We conceive that this variety and succession of fitness for cultivation, shows undoubted marks of a most foreseeing and benevolent design in the Creator of man and of the world. 3. By differences in vegetables of the kind we have above described, the sustentation and gratification of man’s physical nature is copiously provided for. But there is another circumstance, a result of the difference of the native products of different regions, and therefore a consequence of that difference of climate on which the difference of native products depends,[5] which appears to be worthy our notice. The difference of the productions of different countries has a bearing not only upon the physical, but upon the social and moral condition of man.