faloes in
Western America,--everywhere avoiding civilization and courting Nature
and the company of men who either by birth or adoption were the children
of Nature. By day the winds of heaven kissed his cheeks and the sun
bronzed them: at night he often fell asleep wondering at the star-worlds
that gemmed the only canopy over his welcome blanket-couch.

His treatment of consumption was certainly a rational one, and perhaps
the only one that is ever wholly successful. But, alas! few can take so
costly a prescription.

How often had his studies led him to dissect the bodies of animals that
had died in their dens in the Jardin des Plantes! Often in the first
generation of cage-life, almost always in the second, invariably in the
third, they grow dull, listless, the fire goes out of their eyes, the
litheness out of their limbs: they forget to eat, they cough, and soon
they die. Of what? Consumption. Once our fathers were wild and lived in
the open air: they scarcely ever died, as we do, of consumption.
Crowded cities, bad drainage, overwork, want of healthful exercise,
stimulating food, dissipation,--these are human cage-life. If a man is
threatened with consumption, let him go back to the plains and forests
before it is too late.

Certainly the treatment benefited Fournier. By and by it did more--it
cured him. The cough was forgotten, the cheeks filled out, the muscles
became hard as bundles of steel wire, his strength was prodigious: he
ate his food with a relish unknown in Paris, and slept like a child.

Nevertheless, his mind, trained to habits of thought and observation,
was not idle. When a city was his home he had been a physiologist and
had studied _man_: he made the world his dwelling-place, and wandering
among the nations he became an ethnologist and began to study _men_.

A distinguished professor, writing of the influence of climate upon man,
for the sake of illustration supposes the case of a human being whose
life should be prolonged through many ages, and who should pass that
life in journeying slowly from the arctic regions southward through the
varying climates of the earth to the eternal winter of the antarctic
zone. Always preserving his personal identity, this traveler would
undergo remarkable changes in form, feature and complexion, in habits
and modes of life, and in mental and moral attributes. Though he might
have been perfectly white at first, his skin would pass through every
degree of darknes