white bears.

In the temperate regions the productions of the above-mentioned
extremes are mingled. Here many animals whose flesh is fit for human
food live and thrive, and here grows, too, a vast variety of
nutritious fruits, and roots, and seeds. The physical constitution of
the various races of men that inhabit these regions is modified
accordingly. In the temperate climes men can live on vegetable food,
or on animal food, or on both. The constitution differs, too, in
different individuals, and it changes at different periods of the
year. Some persons require more of animal, and others more of
vegetable food, to preserve their bodily and mental powers in the best
condition, and each one observes a change in himself in passing from
winter to summer. In the summer the desire for a diet of fruits and
vegetables seems to come northward with the sun, and in the winter the
appetite for flesh comes southward from the arctic regions with the
cold.

When we consider the different conditions in which the different
regions of the earth are placed in respect to their capacity of
production for animal and vegetable food, we shall see that this
adjustment of the constitution of man, both to the differences of
climate and to the changes of the seasons, is a very wise and
beneficent arrangement of Divine Providence. To confine man absolutely
either to animal or vegetable food would be to depopulate a large part
of the earth.

It results from these general facts in respect to the distribution of
the supplies of animal and vegetable food for man in different
latitudes that, in all northern climes in our hemisphere, men living
in a savage state must be hunters, while those that live near the
equator must depend for their subsistence on fruits and roots growing
wild. When, moreover, any tribe or race of men in either of these
localities take the first steps toward civilization, they begin, in
the one case, by taming animals, and rearing them in flocks and herds;
and, in the other case, by saving the seeds of food-producing plants,
and cultivating them by artificial tillage in inclosed and private
fields. This last is the condition of all the half-civilized tribes of
the tropical regions of the earth, whereas the former prevails in all
the northern temperate and arctic regions, as far to the northward as
domesticated animals can live.

From time immemorial, the whole interior of the continent of Asia has
been inhabited by tribes an