The facts are patent.  Under the equator is found the negro, in the temperate zones the Indo-European, and toward the pole the Lapp and Esquimaux.  They are as different as the climates in which they dwell; nevertheless, history, philology, the common traditions of the race, revelation, point to their brotherhood.

How is it that climate can bring about such modifications in man?  Is it possible that the sun, shining upon his face and his children’s faces for ages, can make their skin dark, and their hair crisp and curly, and their foreheads low?  Or that sunshine and shadow, spring-time and autumn, summer’s showers beating upon him and winter’s snows falling about his path, can make him fair and free?  Or that the dreary night and cheerless day of many changeless arctic years can make him short and fat and stolid as a seal?  Surely not.  These avail much; but other influences, indirect and obscure in their workings, but not the less essentially climatic, are required.  Food, raiment, shelter, occupation, amusement, influences that tell upon the very citadel and stronghold of life—­and all in their very nature climatic, since they are controlled and modified by climate—­are the means by which such changes are effected.  The savage living in the open air, not trammeled with much clothing, anointing his skin with oil, eating uncooked food, delighting in the chase and in battle, and living thus because his surroundings indicate it, becomes swart and athletic, fierce, cunning and cruel—­takes ethnologically the lowest place.  Of literature, science, art, he knows nothing:  for him will is justice, fear law, some miserable fetich God.  Still, in his nature lie dormant all the capabilities of the noblest manhood, awaiting only favorable surroundings to call them into glorious being.  It might shock the salt of the earth to reflect that some centuries of life among them and their fair descendants would make him like them.

The arctic savage clad in furs and eating blubber does not differ essentially from his brother of the tropics.  So much of his food is necessarily converted into heat that he cannot afford to lead so active a life; but he also, like him of the tropics, partakes with his surroundings in color.  The one, living amid snowclad scenery, where the sparse vegetation is gray and grayish-green, and the birds and animals almost as white as the snow over which they wander, is pale, etiolated.  The other, under a vertical sun, surrounded by a lush and lusty growth, whose flowers for variety and intensity of color are beyond description, and in which birds of brightest plumage and black and tawny beasts make their home, has the most marked supply of pigment—­is dark-hued, black, in short a negro.  Between these two extremes is the typical man, fair of face, with expanded brow and wavy hair, well fed, well clad, well housed, wresting from Nature her hidden things and making her mightiest forces the workers of his will; heaping together knowledge, cherishing art, reverencing justice, worshiping God.  How startling the contrast between brothers!