Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Tableaux of New Orleans / by Bennet Dowler. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
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![two days in the week ; the produce of this plant being 133 times more than that of wheat, and 44 time3 more than the yield of tho potato, exceeding (as he supposes,) all plants upon the globe in the amount of food it produces on a given area. In his travels upon tho Orinoco, M. Humboldt says: In those wild regions we are involunta- rily reminded of the assertion of Linnmus, that tho country of palm trees is the first abode of our species, and that man is essentiallypalmivarous. It may bo true that the races in these juihiiii-cmus regions are not the most progressive. Climate is much—race more. Tho balmy air, and the spontaneous fruits of Paradise would probably fail to energize some races of tho American continent. The eternal war against the evils of a rigorous climate, having prolonged winters, consumes a large proportion of man's capital and labor, as completely as an annual conflagration. A long winter—a late spring—a cool, cloudy, wet summer, an untimely frost—an insufficient solar heat, wherewith to ripen many valuable kinds of grain and fruit—a climate that under the most fa- vorable circumstances yields but a single crop, or that sometimes fails almost entirely to yield any crops at all. must render life precarious, threatened as it must be, in many cases, by famine, disease, and death. There is not any compensation whatever derived from tho rigors of cli- mate—great coldness is a great evil, and evil only. The best climate is that in which the great- est amount of tic; physical comforts can be obtained with the least labor—the least uncertainty, and the least anxiety. A pound of beet-sugar is no sweeter because it cost more labor in the making than a pound made from the sugar-cane. An ox-hide is not the less valuable for leather because it cost nothing but a charge of powder and lead. The law of population developed by Malthus, namely: that population is kept down to the i ivel of the means of subsistence by want and misery, recently exemplified in the decimation of [re- land, would not have been felt in a climate where tho labor of two days in a week would suflieo to provide for a family; nor in a climate where a million of unclaimed fat cattle is seen at a glance ; nor in a climate where three crops of com could be matured in one year. (limate, tho potato-rot, and the consequent evils that befel Ireland in the ten last years, caused a decline of Bixteen hundred and iif'ty nine thousand souls—equal to one-fifth of tho whole nation—most of iv bom were as much the victims of climate as Sir John Franklin and his little party, whoso fato still causes vibrations of sympathy throughout the civilized world. The last mails (Nov. 1851,) bring letters, showing that severe famine prevails in a part of the Scandinavian peninsula,, where millions of human beings endure the rigors of a winter of nine months, and an incessant, night of four months duration, illumined only by occasional corruscations of the Au/roree boreales, which shoo! above the snow-clad pines, and shimmer on the slopes of icy mountains. The following statement has appeared in various journals : .—Letters from Sweden speak of a frightful famine which lias set m in the ]ii'e\ ince of Wormerland. The want is so great that the peasantry are forced to -mid the bark of the birch tree, which they u<c, in lieu of rye or wheat, in bread. With the increase of want, crime has already increased to a fearful extent ; and robberies, which in thai quiei and well disciplined country wire known only by hear-say, are now of daily occurreni The remedy for long winters, uncertain crops, and impending starvation, is emigration to tho genial plains of America. Mr. Darby estimates the good land of the globe, excluding deserts, frozen tracts, and poor soils incapable of sustaining a tolerably dense population, at thirty'millions of square miles. The valleys of the Mississippi and the Amazon, now comparatively wildernesses, contain about one- tenth, and by far the richer portions of the whole. Were the Mississippi valley as densely in- habited as England, it would contain two-thirds of the entire population of the world, and make a greater city than the world ha A city, to become permanently great, ought not only to be situated in a genial climate, but it ought to have the sea before it, gemmed with islands like Cuba and other Wesi Indian I lai and a thousand armed river behind it, reaching through a vasl exte I latitude and longitude. Itougl Mtdinan alluvial plain, exuberant with food and the raw material for raiment. Babylon flourished on the alluvial plain of the Euphra ,is; Thebes. Memphis, and twenty-thousand cities and towns, on the Nile—rivers and plains incom- parably inferior ro the river and valley on which New Orleans stands. The Nilotic mud — not](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21115680_0010.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
