Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3through certain imperceptible modifications of the little organ which we call the brain. Boundless change seems to be made to play within definite and very narrow limits, a physiological paradox, wholly inexplicable. But besides individual differences, national distinctions of colour, countenance, and form, are of constant observation. Every large collection of people, for any considerable length of time separated from the rest by civil institutions and geographical lines, have assumed peculiarities of appearance quite remarkable, and by no means of easy explanation. A German is readily distinguished from a Spaniard, and even a Scotchman from an Irishman. These national or congregational distinctions are scarcely easier of explanation than those which are merely personal and individual. They are observed in the descendants from the same stock, who have but recently been separated, and they seem to be acquired with rapidity and lost with great difficulty. We are in the habit of ascribing these differences to climate, yet we do not come to this conclusion from any knowledge we possess of the qualities of the atmosphere in different places, or from reasoning upon the known effects of temperature, but we do not know to what else to attribute these changes; and we prefer to adopt any explanation, however farfetched and ill sustained, rather than to confess ourselves to be utterly and hopelessly ignorant. It can hardly be believed that the climate of Scotland is sufficiently different from that of the other parts ofBritain to produce different features in its inhabitants; and certainly it requires great faith to attribute our American physiognomy, already tolerably distinct, to the influences of a climate ranging from New-Orleans to Passamaquocldy. It would perhaps be as rational to attribute the Irish brogue...