5l4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have ever become fully acclimated within the tropical realm. The 

 colonies which have been founded there by the Teutonic folk, in- 

 cluding the English group therein, have been lamentable failures, 

 the pure-blooded strains dying out in a few generations. The 

 people of southern Europe have been a little more successful in the 

 equatorial regions, probably because their blood has there to a 

 great extent become mingled with that of tropical origin. These 

 general conclusions concerning the climatal limitations of man 

 would be unassailable were it not for the history of the negro in 

 North America. In his case we have the one masterful exception 

 to the rule, otherwise good, that creatures bred near the equator 

 can not endure boreal conditions. 



The negroes who came to North America had to undergo as 

 complete a transition as ever fell to the lot of man, without the least 

 chance to undergo an acclimatizing process. They were brought 

 from the hottest part of the earth to the region where the winter's 

 cold is of almost arctic severity — from an exceedingly humid to 

 a very dry air. They came to service under alien taskmasters, 

 strange to them in speech and in purpose. They had to betake 

 themselves to unaccustomed food and to clothing such as they had 

 never worn before. Rarely could one of the creatures find about 

 him a familiar face of friend, parent, or child, or an object that re- 

 called his past life to him. It was an appalling change. Only 

 those who know how the negro cleaves to all the dear, familiar 

 things of life, how fond he is of warmth and friiendliness, can con- 

 ceive the physical and mental shock that this introduction to new 

 conditions meant to them. To people of our own race it could have 

 meant death. But these wonderful folk appear to have withstood 

 the trials of their deportation in a marvelous way. They showed 

 no peculiar liability to disease. Their longevity or period of use- 

 fulness was not diminished, or their fecundity obviously impaired. 

 So far as I have been able to learn, nostalgia was not a source of 

 mortality, as it would have been with any Aryan population. The 

 price they brought in the market and the satisfaction of their pur- 

 chasers with their qualities shows that they were from the first 

 almost ideal laborers. If we compare the Algonkin Indian, in 

 appearance a sturdy fellow, with these negroes, we see of what stuff 

 the blacks are made. A touch of housework and of honest toil 

 took the breath of the aborigines away, but these tropical exotics 

 fell to their tasks and trials far better than the men of our own 

 kind could have done. 



At their first coming, or soon afterward, the negroes were dis- 

 tributed along the coast of our country from the Carolinas to Nova 

 Scotia. So far as I have been able to find, there appears to have 



