Orographic conditions appear to have great influence. The sunny and fertile land of Languedoc, all mountainous regions not too much affected by goître—Doubs, Côte-d’Or, Ardennes—or those in which it has not succeeded in depressing the stature, that is to say, has been unable to produce endemic cretinism (Jura) give us, when we have put aside all influence of density, race, and temperature, a most notable proportion of men of genius. This may be clearly seen in the table on the following page in which the high figures of goître, stammering, and deaf-mutism, correspond with low stature in Corrèze, Puy-de-Dôme, Ardèche, Ariège, the Basses-Alpes, and the Pyrénées.
We have seen in Var, Vaucluse, and Hérault that a southern climate, perhaps on account of its greater fertility, produces a great number of men of genius; but countries that are cold, but at the same time healthy and mountainous—Jura, Doubs, Meurthe—give still
| Mountainous Departments. | Stature 1831-60 Progressive degree of exemptions. | Progressive degree of great talent among 1,000 inhabitants. | Goîtrous among 1,000 inhabitants. | Cretins among 1,000 inhabitants. | Deaf-mutes among 1,000 inhabitants. | Stammerers among 1,000 inhabitants. |
| Haute-Vienne | 86 | 54 | 17 | 2.0 | 0.61 | 2.23 |
| Hautes-Alpes | 81 | 49 | 111 | 2.2 | 2.2 | 2.8 |
| Corrèze | 85 | 50 | 17 | 4.3 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
| Puy-de Dôme | 84 | 51 | 44 | 3.6 | 1.2 | 1.9 |
| Ardèche | 80 | 58 | 29 | 6.8 | 1.3 | 3.9 |
| Ariège | 60 | 79 | 82 | 4.5 | 0.7 | 4.1 |
| Lozère | 74 | 76 | 29 | 6.8 | 2.10 | 3.4 |
| Basses-Alpes | 71 | 22 | 76 | 6.3 | 0.6 | 7.5 |
| Aveyron | 65 | 44 | 17 | 4.9 | 1.5 | 2.0 |
| Basses-Pyrénées | 51 | 61 | 21 | 3.2 | 0.6 | 2.9 |
| Pyrénées-Orientales | 50 | 57 | 24 | 3.5 | 1.8 | 2.0 |
| Hautes-Pyrénées | 37 | 72 | 62 | 6.2 | 0.7 | 4.0 |
| Vosges | 25 | 46 | 56 | 3.9 | 1.1 | 2.5 |
| Ardennes | 8 | 30 | 17 | 0.5 | 0.8 | 5.2 |
| Jura | 3 | 10 | 58 | 2.0 | 0.6 | 3.0 |
| Côte-d’Or | 2 | 5 | 11 | 3.1 | 0.8 | 1.7 |
| Doubs | 1 | 2 | 22 | 2.9 | 0.6 | 1.0 |
higher figures, and the same isothermal line passes through the Seine-Inférieure and the Seine-et-Oise, both rich in men of genius; and the Vosges, in which they are almost entirely absent, the same line, again, passes through Calvados and Ain, which are very rich in genius, and Saône-et-Loire and Cher, which are deficient in genius.
The nature of the soil has no influence whatever in the production of genius, for we find the highest figures in the Côte-d’Or, the Meuse, and the Moselle, where the soil is calcareous, and the lowest figures in the Nord and Deux-Sèvres, where the soil is of the same character; other high figures are the Doubs, the Jura, and the Meurthe, where the soil is jurassic, while the same soil offers very low figures in the Hautes-Alpes, the Charente, and the Saône-et-Loire.
The influence of race is also very slight; the descendants of the Burgundians produced numerous men of genius in the Jura and the Doubs, very few in the Saône-et-Loire. The Haute-Garonne, with the same race, produces ten times as many men of genius as Ariège, twice as many as Gers, five times as many as the Landes. In Guienne, the Gironde gives twice as many as Lot, and in Languedoc, Hérault gives seven times more than Lozère.
Explanation.—The relation that we have found between genius and climate has been caught sight of long since by the people and the learned, who agree in admitting a frequency of genius in regions which, being hilly, offer mild temperature. The Tuscan proverb says, “Mountaineers, great boots, and keen heads.” Vegetius wrote that climate influences not only the strength of the body, but also that of the mind. “Plaga cœli non solum ad robur corporum sed etiam animorum facit” (lib. i. cap. 2). Athens, the same author remarks, was chosen by Minerva for its subtle air which produces men of sagacity. Cicero said repeatedly that the keen air of Athens gave birth to wise men; the thick air of Thebes only to torpid natures; and Petrarch, in his Epistolarium, which is a kind of summary of his life, remarks with great emphasis that all his chief works were composed, or at all events meditated, among the mild hills of Vaucluse. Michelangelo said to Vasari: “Giorgio, if anything good has come out of my brain, I owe it to the subtle air of your Arezzo.” Zingarelli, when asked how he had composed the melody of Giulietta e Romeo, replied: “Look at that sky, and tell me if you do not feel capable of doing as much.” Muratori, in a letter to an inhabitant of Siena, wrote: “Your air is admirable, really producing fruitful minds.” Macaulay remarks that Scotland, though one of the poorest countries in Europe, stands in the first rank for richness in men of genius; it is sufficient to name Michael Scot, Napier, the inventor of logarithms, Buchanan, Ben Jonson, and, one may perhaps add, Newton. On plains, on the other hand, men of genius are rare. Of ancient Egypt, a country of plains, Renan writes: “No revolutionary, no reformer, no great poet, no artist, no man of science, no philosopher, not even a great minister, can be met in the history of Egypt.... In this sad valley of eternal slavery, for thousands of years they cultivated the fields, carried stones on their backs, and were good officials, living well without glory. There was the same level of moral and intellectual mediocrity everywhere.”[243] And the same may be said in our days.
At first it seems surprising to see a condition of degeneration, such as genius may be called, developing at spots of maximum salubrity. But if there are anærobic microbes, some are ærobic; many forms of degeneration, such as goître, malaria, and leprosy, have a special habitat. It is evident that we have to reckon with the dynamogenic influence of light, with the stimulating action of the ozonized air of the hills, and of a warm temperature. We may understand this the better since we have already seen that heat augments the creative power of men of genius, and the need of the brain for oxydated blood in order to work is well known. This is confirmed by the fact that in mountains above an elevation of three thousand metres, no man of genius has ever been produced. The great Mexican and Peruvian civilizations flourished on the high tablelands, but, as Nibbi has well shown, they were not born there;[244] in fact, the Mexican civilization is owing to the Toltecas, who came from the east, and the pretended great men of Mexico, including its sixty presidents, were not born on the tableland. The same may be said of many men who were not quite justly termed illustrious, such as Echeveria in painting, Moizzos and Cervantes in botany, and Ixtlihcochitl.[245] Some men of true genius, as Garcilasso dela Vega and Alvares de Vera, were born something below three thousand metres at Quito and Bogota.[246]
There is here again a parallelism between genius and insanity. Those who live in mountainous regions are more liable to insanity than the inhabitants of the plains, a fact which has long been embodied in proverbs concerning the air of Monte Baldo, and the madmen of Collio and Tellio. We may recall also the epidemics of Monte Amiata (Lazzaretti), of Busca and Montenero, of Verzegnis; and we may remember, too, that the hills of Judea and of Scotland have produced prophets and half-insane persons gifted with second sight.