514 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it is possible, by means of severe hygienic processes, successfully to 

 bring up an English generation there ; but to do this the children 

 have, as soon as they are able to support the journey, say at five or six 

 years of age, to be taken to the mountains and left there till they are 

 fifteen or sixteen years old. This reminds me of the palm-trees which 

 we succeed in making bear fruit in our gardens. Because, by the use 

 of the most elaborate horticulture we can occasionally cause a plant 

 of the most delicate species to mature its fruit, shall we venture to 

 regard the palm-tree as acclimated in our country ? No more can we 

 assert as much of a population which has no chance of maintaining 

 itself except by taking all its children to the mountains and not allow- 

 ing them to come down thence till they are mature men. A curious 

 kind of family life that, and extremely costly if it were undertaken, 

 the results of which are limited to bringing down the young genera- 

 tion, which is destined to live in the country, from the north to the 

 south, from the mountains to the plain, like the aacient kings of Persia. 

 But the indefatigable perseverance which has been applied for years 

 in organizing this system does not in any way look to the colonization 

 of India. It only seeks to create a new higher class, an aristocracy, 

 which shall be better qualified to govern the country than annual new 

 arrivals from England. I will also observe that the Dutch in Java and 

 their other Eastern establishments have not advanced the problem a 

 step. Every considerable family endeavors to send its children as soon 

 as possible not merely to the mountains, but to Europe, more for physi- 

 cal conservation than for education. As a whole, these attempts at 

 colonization singularly remind us of the fate of the Lombards in Italy. 

 Those people, it is true, survived a little longer on the conquered ter- 

 ritory ; but very few centuries were sufficient to reduce them to the 

 state of hardly appreciable vestiges. And for the Goths, it did not 

 require a hundred years to annihilate them completely in that same 

 Italy. Minute statistical researches have, it is true, quite recently 

 brought to light here and there a few traces of the Lombards, and it 

 is in a similar way not improbable that there may still exist in the 

 country a very little of the ancient Germanic blood ; but in upper Italy 

 there does not remain any well-defined posterity ; and in the northern 

 provinces of Portugal and Spain, where the Visigoths reigned in all 

 their power, it would be just as useless to look for any clearly appre- 

 ciable posterity of the conquerors. I was recently accused of not 

 being willing to range Italy and Spain among the countries favorable 

 to the settlement of families originating in the lands of the North. I 

 am sorry for it, but I can not perceive any facts that make it probable 

 that our countrymen can settle in those states with any expectation 

 of leaving an enduring posterity. I am ready to bow to the proof 

 when it is brought forward. I would also suggest to our physicians 

 of the navy and the merchant marine, and to all who travel for any 

 purpose, that it would be a profitable task to prepare in the most sci- 



