A certain amount of cold seems to be essential to vigor of body and mind, but to produce this good effect it must not be excessive. The continual presence of snow aid ice all through the year in the regions near the North Pole, by reducing all nature to one dead level of uniformity, stunts the mind and by refusing man variety of food and variety of bodily employment, stunts the body also. The long night, lasting for half the year, in which the inhabitants of the extreme north are condemned to unavoidable inaction, tends to produce the same effect. Thus it is that among the Greenlanders and Laplanders, though they live along the fringes of European civilization, no distant intellectual or moral progress marks the course of centuries. They show great skill in hunting the seal and in the few other industries that the intense cold allows them to practice: but their manners and customs are those of savages.