The modifications of the external aspects of organic nature produced by man's interference / by George Rolleston.

  • Rolleston, George, 1829-1881.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The modifications of the external aspects of organic nature produced by man's interference / by George Rolleston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    noniadi(‘:” and that even the most so amon^ them have also inherited manv civilised cravmo;s which are necessarily starved, and thus entail personal discomfort and create the required stimulus for their gratification, when they are temjited to let themselves lapse into savage Corsican sloth. In the thousands of years which may yet intervene between us and the necessity ibr a southward exodus, these cravings and uneasinesses will have become more inseparably a part of our nature than even the most optimistically-minded member of the London School Board can as yet assert they have become. I have not far to look for another authority who will assure us that the desire and appetite for intellectual enjoyment may become as really a “ constitutional demand ” as those lower stimuli which in “ old, unhappy, far-off times ” enabled man to subdue othei' gregarious animals to his own uses, and, so aided, to overrun victoriously tlie whole globe. Your Secretary, ]\Ir. Bates, after eleven years of absence from England, to which the world owes his charming work the ‘Naturalist on the Biver Amazon,’ and after seeing many tribes living in the happy position in which a moderate amount of light w'ork will produce for the simple, peaceful, and friendly people all the necessaries of their simple lil'e (Z. c., vol. ii. p. 137 of tlie Mundurucus), found yet (p. 416) “ after three years of renewed experience of England, how incomparably superior is civilised life, where feelings, tastes, and intellect, tind abundant nourishment, to the spiiitual sterility of half- savage existence, even if it were passed in the garden of Eden. What has struck me,” says Mr. Bates, “ pow erfully is the immeasurably greater diversity and interest of human character and social conditions in a single civilised nation, than in equa- torial South America, where three distinct races of man live together. The superiority of the bleak north to tropical regions, liowever, is only in their social aspect, for I hold to the opinion that although humanity can reach an advanced state of culture only by battling with the inclemencies of nature in high lati- tudes, it is under the equator alone that the perfect race of the future will attain to complete fruition of man’s beautiful heritage, the earth.” * * V. Baer, who after making himself in liis earlier years a prince amono- biologists, became in his later years a not inconsiderable geographer, expressed himself in Russian so long ago as 1848 in one of the geographical manuals of the Geographical Society of Russia to much tlie same eflect as the two writers above quoted. His words were translated into German no earlier than 1873, and stand as follows in his ‘ Studien aus dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschafte ’ Theil ii., Hiilfte i. p. 45-46: “Mit recht propheziet daher aus dieser Productions - Kraft der Tropcnwelt ein gcistreicher Botanikcr, Herr Meier in Ivbnigsberg, dass dor IMensch, in der