CLIMATE AND HEALTH. 319 



republics of Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, 

 Peru, Bolivia, Chili, Paraguay, Uruguay, the larger part of 

 Brazil, Argentina, down to Patagonia, with the exceptions above 

 mentioned, there is not now and there never has been any farm 

 labor but white farm labor since the settlement of that vast con- 

 tinent ; and the widest portion is directly under the equator. I 

 do not include the Indians in this statement, because when wild 

 they do not work in the sense here meant, and when brought 

 under the influence of the Spanish and Portuguese civilization 

 they immediately mix with and become essentially one with their 

 white coworkers. I do not deny that there are pestilential 

 lagoons which are more pestilential than any similar territory 

 to be found north. But I do not believe that, shunning local 

 conditions which would be bad anywhere, and worse in the 

 tropics, well-selected locations are unhealthy because of tropical 

 heat and moisture, except in certain cases. On the other hand, I 

 believe that almost all elderly people and a large number of over- 

 worked and tired-out persons would find that tropical life costs a 

 largely diminished outlay of energy with a corresponding hus- 

 banding of nervous .and metabolic forces. In illustration of the 

 foregoing statement I give the following facts : 



The island of Dominica lies in fifteen degrees north latitude 

 and contained twenty-nine thousand people in 1885. Dr. Nicholls, 

 the chief medical officer of the island, whom I personally know, 

 made a report to the managers of the Colonial Exhibition held in 

 London in the year 1886, in which he stated that the death rate 

 of the preceding year was fifteen and a half per thousand of the 

 population that is to say, the death rate in this small island, 

 deep in the tropics, was less by ten per thousand than the average 

 for New York city. The people are mostly blacks. Further in- 

 quiries revealed the fact that there were, at that time, three hun- 

 dred and ninety-one white people men, women, and children 

 and that there had been two deaths among them during the pre- 

 vious year : one from apoplexy and one, a nun, died from phthisis, 

 which she had brought from England, she having come to the 

 island in the hope of benefit to her health. In fact, there was not 

 one death among the whites from any disease generally supposed 

 to be especially tropical. The death rate is higher in some of the 

 other islands, but not higher, according to the best information I 

 could get, than in northern communities from the same classes of 

 diseases. It should also be remembered that many of the West 

 India Islands are in a deplorably bad sanitary condition, exposing 

 them to be scourged from time to time by importations of yellow 

 fever, smallpox, and such like epidemics, when, of course, the 

 death rate is largely increased. The foregoing applies more espe- 

 cially to the Windward Islands, which possess some conspicuous 



