"A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust: and when Can man its shattered splendors renovate, Recall its virtues back, and vanquish time and fate?" VIII. During this period of two centuries of colonization the European races have attempted to perpetuate their families upon these lands in question. They brought with them strong physical forces, and a high degree of mental cultivation. Mental strength will endure extremes of climate to a singular degree, but even this gradually yields to cosmic influences. It is a well-observed law of Nature that man must be organized in harmony with the condition of climate, otherwise he perishes. This scale of the strength of resisting opposing forces depends greatly upon the purity of the blood and the cultivation of the mind, whose remarkable powers of resisting disease have been observed and pointed out by Malte-Brun, Goethe, Kant, and other philosophers. Europeans may visit and remain for limited periods in almost every portion of the globe. The deadly miasms of Central America, the pestilential atmospheres of Central Africa, and the frozen mists of either pole, are braved by the inquiring travellers of the civilized races, but not with impunity. Intelligent and educated men may live for a while as gentlemen of leisure, in the midst of malarial climates, almost without perceptible effect, but the moment they apply their forces to the cultivation of the earth, Nature asserts her rights. Yet during the period of the rich man, whilst he lives without physical labor, in ease, contemplation, and contentment, degeneration is slowly but surely taking place. The law of fecundity proves it, as with the Mamelukes in Egypt, as observed by Volney. The English race loses its energy, according to Farr, in two or three generations in the lowlands of the West India Islands and in Southern Asia. The Duke of Wellington believed that every English family in Lower Bengal would die out in the third generation. IX. The laws of nature as regards influences of climate, food, and society, have operated less upon the condition of the rich slaveholder than the poorer white, who has struggled for existence, contending with the poverty of sterile or abandoned soils, and the hostile influences of climate, and the sneer of the slave and his master. The rich man has resisted the opposing forces of the elements with less apparent changes, whilst the poor man has succumbed to the influences and sadly degenerated, but the poor white still possesses the rough nobility and majesty of natural man, whilst the rich slaveholder, with his perverted ideas of honor, virtue, and justice, has gained the merited contempt of mankind. For the one, civilization has the sympathetic feeling of compassion; from the other, Nature herself recoils in horror.