A CCLIMA TIZA TION. 5 1 3 



prospered, though unequally. There are also some young colonies 

 founded by Germans on the Rio Grande, in Brazil, which a fancy still 

 needing confirmation has placed iu the rank of healthful countries and 

 suitable for our people. Reviewing the results that have been ob- 

 tained in the colonies thus briefly enumerated, which embrace the sum 

 of the more or less fortunate enterprises of the kind, we see that their 

 success has been in inverse proportion to the difference in isothermic 

 latitude between them and the mother-country of the colonists. 

 But in every ease it is not probable that the organization of the colo- 

 nists has escaped having to pay, at the expense of profound altera- 

 tions, for acclimatization in foreign countries. Men of science, as well 

 as tourists, have been interested for many years in the study of the 

 Yankee type, which, according to the general opinion, is not wholly 

 comparable either with the English or the German, or with a cross of 

 the two with the Irish race. The peculiar physiology of the Yankee 

 is yet to be made out, and I can not insist too strongly on the great 

 value of the scientific results that might accrue from the study of this 

 delicate ethnological problem. It is averred that the transformations 

 of this type grow more pronounced as we go from the Northern to the 

 Southern States. 



It sometimes occurs that a population transplanted into a distant 

 country remains apparently stationary. Nothing seems to distinguish 

 it from the compatriots which it has left in its native country. But, 

 on regarding it more closely, we find that there is operating within it 

 one of the gravest phenomena in the history of colonization — a phe- 

 nomenon which has been long observed in animals and plants when 

 transported to new climates : a decrease of fecundity and an arrest of 

 development, going at length to the complete elimination of posterity. 

 It is evident that the condition most essential to the prosperity of a 

 colony, the only guarantee of its longevity, resides m the number of 

 children in the families of the settlers ; children who, in their turn, 

 the source of posterity, lead, as at home, to the branching out of every 

 family into numerous ramifications. The further we advance into 

 exotic climates, the more rapidly does the diminution of the reproduc- 

 tive faculty of the colonist go on, the more do statistics indicate a 

 reduction in the number of births and an increasing sterility in suc- 

 cessive generations. This fact has been noticed not only by doctors, 

 who have called attention to it from time immemorial, but persons 

 also who could have no prejudice in the matter — statesmen, military 

 men, literary men, and men of every profession and every country, 

 and those who lived in times when the question had not yet begun to 

 be the order of the day — have observed for the most diverse countries 

 that families formerly fertile, but who contracted alliances exclusively 

 with natives of the exotic countries, lasted only a few generations. 



It has never been possible, even to this day, to establish a durable 

 colonization in British India. It has, indeed, been said recently that 



VOL. XXTIII. 33 



