In revisiting the earth on coming into close relations with each town, I found it had its distinctive atmosphere. The value of land did not depend upon the soil nor upon the climatic conditions so much as upon the human equation. Two communities upon the same railway with like physical conditions will find themselves growing apart. One place might have slightly inferior outward conditions. These are speedily overcome. Watch it grow.
The Home of the Angels
In this garden of the earth one quickly loses his heart to Los Angeles. Her hotels are the last word in luxury. Thousands of citizens having become rich in Iowa spend their money in this Land of the Afternoon. While they have found California about as nature made it, besides the elements of the air and soil, Los Angeles has an atmosphere that is purely social. It is an attractive place to live, choice people have assembled there, and so, under pleasant conditions, others are drawn. The money in Pasadena never came out of the soil contiguous to the place. A man buying land saw how things were tending and the neighborhood in which he was going and said to the driver that he need not go any farther. The lay of the land and quality would make no difference. The atmosphere was alien and he was through. In the same state you find towns that are as unlike as if they stood on different continents. In San Francisco, all unannounced, you, on crossing a street, pass an equatorial, invisible line into the Chinese quarter which, in atmosphere, is five thousand miles away. There is in Paris an activity, a rapidity of movement that you do not find in Holland or in England. The people walk faster, talk faster, eat faster, ride faster, and live faster in all respects than do their neighbors. The English love the past and protest against the removal of the ancient land-marks, while the French love innovation. The atmosphere of the city of Washington, not being like most national capitals, a center of trade, is world-wide from that of Chicago. So much is it out of the popular drift that while a state was voting over-whelmingly for constitutional prohibition the measure was discountenanced by both of its senators. One atmosphere has in it a kind of vitalizing life, a perpetual marvel and a perpetual delight, reviving every faculty and affection, while in another the doctors administer quinine to the saffron-colored sojourners in its fever-haunted marshes.
New Forms of Matter, New Crystallizations
Every region has its peculiar fitness for some particular kind of growth, Missouri apples, Michigan peaches, California oranges, Kentucky blue-grass, Wisconsin clover. To the south and west is the corn belt. Specific well-known places are best adapted to the varied form of animal life. The three northern continents are temperate; the three southern continents are tropical. In these warmest regions nature displays its fullest energy, its greatest diversity, its richest colors, and development. The animal kingdom grows in strength and perfection in this privileged zone, yet man presents his purest and most perfect type at the center of the temperate continents. At the base of the Himalayas vegetation is of a tropical character; at an elevation of five thousand feet European plants succeed. Wheat grows at an elevation of thirteen thousand feet, barley at fifteen thousand. We do not look for the best trees on the bleak mountain top but in the genial valley. As we go up the struggle for existence increases until even the sturdiest fail to thrive above the "timber line." Number one wheat can be produced only in localities where the summers are short and the winters long and cold. Corn is capable of the widest cultivation, but even that has its northern and southern limits. Climate is nature's smile and goes with the land. No man can farm against the climate and no medication can do for an invalid what the half-tropical sunshine will do in an oasis city. There is no more fascinating study than that of the sustaining, producing, and modifying effects of atmosphere.
A Lesson that Will Last a Lifetime
It enhances our interest as we return to breathe again the air that made us ourselves as distinguished from others. We have known well our own standards, our ideals, our resolves, but how came we with what we find ourselves possessed. It adds interest to the old temples to visit the quarries which furnish them forth. In revisiting the earth it thrills us to look at the rock whence we were hewn. Our temptations were those peculiar to that locality. What I know about temptation is entirely different from what a remote stranger would guess. Our struggles were such as that environment occasioned and are not appreciated by persons in a different zone. Each soul has its own climate. Even man's sight responds to his environment. On watch, day in, day out, on a sailing vessel, scanning the distant horizon, the eye, becoming adapted to it, is far-sighted. It can hardly read fine print held close to the person. Even children brought up at the seaside and accustomed to far sights have to patiently await a readjustment of their vision. I can now trace, in my being, some reflex effect of each set of surroundings, in which for a term of years, I was placed. My experience in a new environment amounted to a re-birth. One educator considers the proximity of a mountain, worth at least to the student, one endowed professorship. "Let no one say he has written my life," said Walpole. "He has not the needful information. He never knew the crowd of little things which went to make my individual being and career. No one knows them but myself." One's interruptions and trials and crises and providences come with such surroundings as he then has and it is a striking experience, when revisiting the earth, to discover for one's self the agencies and influences by which he was moulded.