Where the wild hare and the crow Whiten in surrounding snow—
the process may be accelerated by a century or so. But, till some philosopher gets his pair of blacks, and sits fairly down to see the experiment out, we shall be of opinion that, centuries would be necessary to counteract the slow workmanship of nature in this business; but certainly, that at the end of that time, the whole human type would have suffered a perfect change, conformable to the latitude and longitude—the _locus in quo_. We repeat—those early effects of climate, tropical or boreal, were such as no elemental influence noted in modern times can give us any correct idea of. Ages and continents were the first premises and means, by and from which Nature stamped her human varieties in the first ages.
Coming from the physical and ethnical considerations, we see the influence of the material elements very perceptible, in the social, moral, and historical manifestations of the various races of the world. A consideration of the Asiatics, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and other nations of ancient or modern name, would make this evident. The Easterns inhabiting, in Central Asia, vast extents of level country, for the most part at a distance from the sea, were chiefly pastoral and nomadic. They had room to wander and grow, and be numbered by millions. Under such circumstances, they were naturally liable to be dominated by great commanders, to whom—seeing that their unsettled polity also included the principles of war and plunder—they would delegate the leadership; and who, on the broad _plateaux_, could make use of cavalry and chariots—those ready means of conquest and despotism in the old times. Hence the people fell numerously under the sway of a few kings, who used their power with the fierceness and irresponsibility of gods, and kept the soldiery and the masses in a state of slavery—whether following plunder, cultivating the soil, or making bricks from mud, and rearing with these, through sweating generations, those walls and towers of Central Asia—Nineveh, Babylon, and so forth—of which we have transmitted to us such vague and magnificent traditions, and of which Layard and others have been discovering some traces for us latterly.