Where falls not hail or rain or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly.

Still, near the Tropics, such regions may be found; in milder epochs they spread far toward the Poles.

Even yet, man seems to carry with him mementoes of some idyllic past. In his mind a grasshopper, each summer he assumes that the ever-blooming tropics still surround him. Only by hard-won wisdom, not by racial aptitude, does he lay up for the future. The birds fly south without waiting for frost; the bear stores up fat to hibernate; the bee and the beaver hoard food. If such creatures had grave and reverend philosophers, they might teach more concern with the present, and less with the future. But the average man always has difficulty in getting round to mend the roof in dry weather.

From the tropics also may stem man’s dislike of the violent changes of the temperate zones. For (as the saying goes) the tropics have climate but no weather; they display a set diurnal or seasonal rhythm. In his deepest instincts man seems to expect such sameness, to resent sudden shifts. He has never learned that in mid-latitudes unusual weather is all he can expect. He always grumbles.

One belief of man’s growth is that when as a proto-human he faced a more severe climate, he was forced to work harder and so survived and started on the road to civilization. But this negative theory fails to explain why man did not retreat to the tropics or else like other species merely die off after a few uncomfortable lingering generations.

Another theory of survival stresses weather instead of climate. When the gentle epoch ended and storms became many and violent, then those very storms—the shock of constant adjustment—stimulated man out of his tropical languor, and gave him power and will to outface a harsher world. With each storm and passing front, blood pressure rises and falls, nerves react, secretions alter. So physicians have learned, and they quote from Hippocrates, father of medicine: “Air is lord.”

Some theorists say even that civilization can flourish only in the lands along the storm-track, where man most often feels the bracing shift from warm and moist to cold and dry, back and forth. For evidence, they point to Ptolemy’s records, which seem to show that in their times of greatness the Mediterranean lands knew more turns of weather than now in these decadent days.

This marriage of civilization and storms has not been proved, or yet refuted. If it is true, then those atmospheric powers which seem to overwhelm men in the temperate zone, also stimulate the energy to live and conquer. Civilized men are like Napoleon’s grenadiers—they always grumble, but they always march.

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