I am a great believer in climate and food in the making of men. A man is what he eats, and, according to the climate he lives in, robust or feeble. Go from the Arctic or colder regions, toward the equator, and every few hundred miles there can be seen a physical degeneracy of mankind, and the mental qualities must also be affected. Italy is an approach to India, and Egypt more so. The ready memorizing people of tropical Bengal are as exuberant as the vegetation around them, and like the vegetation, they are watery, without strength or firmness. How different from the sturdy hardwood forests of the north and its hardy, brave people! Take a Hindu, a Bengali, with his slender worm-like fingers, and transplant him to Norway. What would he do with an axe trying to fell a sturdy pine? It would be a sight worth going to see. What would those rice-eaters do in stemming the stormy blasts of a northern winter? I once saw a fight in the streets of London, of men with brawny arms, and fists that came with sledgehammer force upon each other! Some day, when I can get leisure, I am going to write an article on fists, and the people who can make them. There is so much of human character in a fist. I never saw a native of India make up a fist for a fight. When they do not attack each other with their tongues, at which they are experts, the bamboo lathi, native to the climate, is their natural weapon, and then it is not a face to face, but a behind the back attack, a sure sign of weakness and cowardice. I am an admirer of the Anglo-Saxon in the English in this, that they have such a steady, stolid pugnacity, never knowing when they are whipped, and fight for what they think is right till there are none left to fight; always keep their backs behind them and their faces toward their foes, and it never need be asked of them when they return from battle, “Have they their wounds in front?” Take another country. Where would the grim theology, philosophy and metaphysics of the German people be without their cold, sluggish climate, the black rye bread, the beer, the rank cheese, the sauerkraut, the sausages, and everlasting pipe? It is a wonder they can think at all, so clogged and befuddled their minds must be, and the results of their thinking is just what might be expected, heavy and cloggy. We went to Germany, and it was among her people that I got this impression. We spent most of our time, nearly a year, in France, that paradise of the world, neither too hot nor too cold, and would ever have remained there if possible; the land of bright skies, of fruit and flowers, with its happy, contented, courteous people. Better a dinner of herbs in France, with its sunshine, than roast beef in England and fog therewith. No wonder that the French think so little about heaven when they have such a beautiful country to live in on earth.