São Paulo has thus been transformed into one of the most healthful cities in the world, and one of the handsomest. Its climate, uniformly mild like that of southern Europe, has never left anything to be desired—except, perhaps, snow and ice, if there are among the residents there any homesick northerners who prefer the sharper seasonal contrasts to which they are accustomed. The site is too near the tropics and the mountains are not high enough for freezing cold, yet so high that the air has a bracing, invigorating quality. As Senator Root declared when he was visiting the country: “There is something in the air of São Paulo that makes strong and vigorous men.” Their strength and vigor are not attributable, however, to the climate alone. It is an inheritance. The early Paulistas were of the sturdiest type, men who were compelled to maintain themselves and extend and defend their possessions by fighting and the hardest kind of work—an instance, they were, of the survival of the fittest. It is small wonder that their descendants, with their rich heritage of health and vitality and traditions, and their enormously productive lands, should be distinguished for their enterprise as well as for their wealth and social and intellectual culture. In political and educational progress they have always been prominent. A splendid monument to their patriotism and enterprise is Ypiranga, a great building of classic design, erected on the site of the proclamation of independence on a hill overlooking the city, and intended both to commemorate the event and to be used as an institution of learning. Among other interesting things, it contains a remarkable museum. They have a polytechnic school in the city that is the pride of the whole country, and the graduates of which are in demand everywhere because of the particularly efficient system of training; an institution known as the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts, devoted to the practical instruction of the artisan classes, which graduates skilled workmen by the hundreds every year; and an excellently equipped normal school that occupies a whole square, facing the Praca de Republica—these in addition to primary institutions and conventional colleges and law and medical schools, that are attended by students from all over Brazil.