CHAPTER II. It is not for nothing, then, that we are taught in church to call all men our brethren, and we must learn to realize that all the nations of the earth are akin to us and to one another, and that the differences between them in looks, in moral qualities, and in mind are really not much more than what we often see in the members of one large family, where one brother may be a genius and make a great name or a fortune for himself, while another will never get beyond the simplest schooling and, later on, the plainest work as laborer or poorly paid clerk. Take the most light-complexioned child to the tropics, and there let him lead an outdoor life--hunting, herding cattle, building, ploughing, and harvesting--then look at the middle-aged man; you will find him burnt by the sun, tanned by wind and weather to a dark brown which will not bleach off even should he return to his native northern country to live. His children will be born darker than he was, his grandchildren probably darker still, and so on. What, then, must be the change should the descendants of a particular set of men live thousands--not hundreds, but thousands--of years in one particular zone of the earth, under the same conditions of climate, food, and local nature generally--what we call "environment"? This is exactly what happened to those detachments which once upon a time separated from the original human family. Each may have gone forth at random, but there was the earth to choose from and to be had for the taking; and, wherever such a detachment settled, there was nothing to prevent its posterity staying on and on, and developing their own peculiarities under local influences; for it would take many, many centuries before there would again be a lack of room and the process of separation would be repeated. Thus were formed the subdivisions of the human kind, with their striking characteristics and distinctive peculiarities, which we call the great Races of the World. Now, if this thing were to happen to any one of us--that we should discover brothers and kinsfolk of whom we knew nothing before--we would be very curious to find out all we could about them: where they came from, what had happened to them during all those years until they settled where we found them, and when and why they separated from their forefathers, who were also our own. These are the very things we want to find out about the various nations who live in the world now, and those who have lived in it before anything existed of what is now in the world, all the way back to the beginning.