and in the same environment, one man goes wrong, another repents, and another remains indifferent. Not what is done to us but what we do is the thing that determines character and destiny.
(924)
ENVIRONMENT, ADAPTATION TO
Joseph Cook taught that character tends to assume a fixt type, as marked as in the case of mice, cited below:
Mice were originally natives of southern
Asia. From there they have accompanied
man in his wanderings to all parts of the
world, traveling, as he has traveled, in ox-teams
and on the backs of donkeys, by steamship
and railway; taking up their quarters
wherever he does, first in log-cabins with
thatched roofs; and finally, in some instances,
on the nineteenth floor of a steel
building where generation after generation
may live and die in turn without having so
much as touched foot to the earth.
Strangely enough, the race seems to be proof against the changes wrought upon most animals by difference in environment. Specimens from the opposite sides of the globe, or from widely separated latitudes, are said to be practically indistinguishable, as if at last the species had hit upon a style of form and coloring perfectly suited to all conditions of life.—Witmer Stone and William Everett Cram, "American Animals."
(925)
Environment and Man—See Mean, The Golden.
Environment Controlled—See Control
of Circumstances.
ENVIRONMENT, CREATING OUR OWN
Often the individual bemoans the depression of environment. A converse fact may be referred to, namely, that man produces his own environment. It is in his power largely to make his own world, by paying attention to the things of himself. An illustration of this is found by an English writer who insists that we can make our own climates, as he says:
Effective sanitary ventilation should supply
gentle and uniformly diffused currents
of air of moderate and equal temperature
throughout the house. We talk a great deal
about the climate here and the climate there;
and when we grow old, and can afford it, we
move to Bournemouth, Torquay, Menton,
Nice, Algiers, etc., for better climates, forgetting
all the while that the climate in which
we practically live is not that out-of-doors,
but the indoor climate of our dwellings, the
which, in a properly constructed house, may
be regulated to correspond to that of any
latitude we may choose.
(926)
ENVIRONMENT, DESTRUCTIVE
An English writer, with some novel ideas of how the smoke-laden atmosphere of London might be purified, writes:
At one time I thought of proposing the
establishment of horticultural home-missions
for promoting the dissemination of flower-*pot
shrubs in the metropolis, and of showing
how much the atmosphere of London would
be improved if every London family had
one little sweetbrier-bush, a lavender-plant,
or a hardy heliotrope to each of its members;
so that a couple of millions of such ozone
generators should breathe their sweetness
into the dank and dead atmosphere of the
denser central regions of London.
A little practical experience of the difficulty of growing a clean cabbage, or maintaining alive any sort of shrub in the midst of our soot-drizzle, satisfied me that the mission would fail, even tho the sweetbriers were given away by the district visitors; for these simple hardy plants perish in a mid-London atmosphere unless their leaves are periodically sponged and syringed, to wash away the soot particles that otherwise close their stomata and suffocate the plant.
The ingenious scheme would fail because
the plants themselves would become
foul and need to be cleansed.
Failing this, they would die. So in
life character is easily incrusted with
the spirit of worldliness. (Text.)
(927)
ENVIRONMENT INADEQUATE
Shortly after Chief Justice Chase had gone
for the first time to Washington, he was returning
to the West. The train stopt at a
little station in Virginia, and he was informed
that it was the birthplace of Patrick Henry.
