A CCLIMA TIZA Tl ON. 66 5 



cereals or lighter food. The Chinese are especially favored in ac- 

 commodation to a new tropical climate by reason of their simple 

 diet of rice. 



More important even than food, as a correction to be applied, 

 is the effect of daily habits of life and of profession upon the 

 physiological processes.* 



An indolent life always and everywhere tends to superinduce 

 a multitude of disorders. De Quatrefages has pointed out that in 

 the West Indies the wealthy and idle Creoles, and not the " petit 

 blancs," swell the death-rate of the white population above the 

 average, t Gentle and regular exercise, then, must be accounted 

 one of the most important hygienic precautions to be observed. 

 Worse than lack of exercise, however, is overexertion, especially 

 if it be coupled with exposure to the hot sun or to miasmatic 

 exhalations. Statistics for the Jewish race, confining all its ac- 

 tivities to shops in the towns, must be corrected, therefore, for 

 this circumstance, before they are compared with statistics for 

 the Germans, who as colonists take up the ever-deadly cultiva- 

 tion of the soil. The Boers, who thrive as herders, would un- 

 doubtedly suffer were they to stir up the soil as husbandmen. % 

 Most favored of all is that nationality which is seafaring by na- 

 ture. The apparently high vitality of the Italians and Maltese 

 in Algeria is in part because they are mainly sailors and fisher- 

 men.* In consonance with this principle is the relative immunity, 

 already cited, of the wives and children of soldiers in India. || 

 Slavery also always produces a terrific death-rate which vitiates 

 all comparison between the statistics for the white and the negro."^ 

 It should be noted, moreover, that such an institution exercises a 

 selective choice upon the negro ; for the survivors of such severe 

 treatment will generally be a picked lot, which ought to exhibit 

 vitality to a marked degree, all the weaklings having been re- 

 moved. ^ Racial comparisons are also invalidated by the fact that 

 hygiene and sanitation are generally confined to the European 

 populations, so that, other things being equal, a higher death-rate 

 among the natives would be most natural. 



In any scientific discussion of the effect of climate upon the 

 human body the racial element must always be considered ; and 



* Archiv fiir Anthropologic, xxiii, p. 407. f Op. cit., p. 236. 

 X Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft fiir Anthropologie, 1885, p. 258. 



* Jousset, op. cit., p. 291. 



II Vide also Verhandlungen dor Berliner Gesellschaft fiir Anthropologie, 1886, p. 90. 

 In some cases the mortality of adult women is higher, as in the island of St. Louis. Revue 

 d' Anthropologie, new series, v, p. 30 ef seq. ^ De Quatiefages, op. cit , p. 234. 



() The bearing of this in Algeria is discussed in Revue d' Anthropologie, second series, v, 

 pp. 47, 54. 



