It is natural that those who live in cold climates and who wear for their comfort clothing designed to exclude the air from all parts of the body save the face should be steeped in conservatism; but the farther one ventures from the chaste opinion of the world the less subserviency he shows to customs and habits authoritative and relevant among century-settled folk, and the more readily he adapts himself to his environment the sooner does he become a true citizen of the country which he has chosen. Preconceptions he must discard as unfit, if not fatal. He is an alien until he learns to house, feed, and dress himself in accordance with the inviolable laws which Nature prescribes to each and every portion of her spacious and discordant realm. Was I to remain fully clad and comfortless, or the reverse? The indulgence of my sensations has brought about revolutionary changes of costume and custom. Such changes were bound to react mentally, for are they not merely the symbols of ideas? Once it was unseemly, if not uncleanly, to perspire freely. Now the function is looked upon as necessary, wholesome, and the sign of one's loyalty to the sun. The sun compels thoughts. Daily, hourly does he exact homage and reign supreme over mind, body, and estate. So commanding is his rule, so apparent his goodwill, so speedy his punishment for sins of disobedience, so influential his presence, that I have come to look up to him as the transcendent manifestation of that power which ordains life and all its privileges and abolishes all the noisesomeness of death. Alive, he nourishes, comforts, consoles, corrects us. Dead, all that is mortal he transforms into ethereal and vital gases. Obey him, and he blesses; flout him, and you perish. An old historian of sport quaintly expressed a correct theory as to the virtue of profuse perspiration: "And when the hunters do their office on horseback and on foot, they sweat often; then if they have any evil in them it must come away in the sweating; so that he keep from cold after the heat." So does the wise man in the tropics regard perspiration--not as an offensive, certainly not as a pleasant function, but as one that is really inevitable and conducive to cleanliness and health. Can the man who swathes his body in ever so many separate, superimposed, artificial skins, and who is careful to banish purifying air from contact with him, save on the rare occasions of the bath, be as healthful as he who furnishes himself with but a single superfluous skin, and that as thin and penetrable as the laws which hold society together permit? The play of the sterilising sun on the brown, moist skin is not only tolerable but delightful--refreshing and purifying the body, while even light cotton clothing saturated to the dripping stage with perspiration represents the acme of discomfort, and if unchanged a good deal of the actually unwholesome.