When we arrive under a latitude or a thermometrical mean which exceeds by some degrees that of England or France, we find the inhabitants giving way to sloth and indolence; their manners are at once softer and yet fiercer, their passions more violent and their tastes more fertile; arts and poesy occupy them to the neglect of the exact sciences; industry and commerce languish, agriculture is despised. But if, on the contrary, we proceed towards the north, we discover a greater degree of civilization, a warmer devotion to labour. The most industrious peoples of the world, the English and the Dutch, inherit a cold, humid, and even foggy atmosphere. In Canada and the northernmost States of the American Union, the Anglo-Saxon race has lost nothing of its laborious habits and its enterprising audacity. In Sweden and in Norway, in Russia, even in Siberia, the traveller meets with towns and villages in a flourishing condition up to the 60th parallel of north latitude and beyond, under a climate whose mean _annual_ temperature is inferior to the mean _winter_ temperature of France, and where the thermometer frequently descends in winter below--40° R. Thus, then, we see that the warm bland tropical air enervates the mind as well as the body, while the cold of the north seems to increase their energy. It is also true that cold climates, all things considered, are healthier than hot countries, where disease is more rapid and fatal in its inroads; and that, finally, civilization furnishes man with the means of protecting himself against the injurious effects of a very low temperature, while it leaves him without defence against those of excessive heat. We shall see hereafter that the human organism modifies itself, in the Polar regions, in such a manner as to support, without too great suffering, a degree of cold which at the outset it appears to us must be absolutely intolerable.