WHITE RACE IN THE TROPICS WARD 571 



sibility of carrying through any such campaign over the whole of 

 that vast area will be obvious at one glance. Yet, in spite of all 

 these difllculties, the advance that has been made within the last few 

 decades inevitably leads us to hope that eventually life may be as 

 safe from disease in the inner Tropics as it is in our own home 

 climates. 



In view of the large number of factors involved in the problem 

 of acclimatization, and of the very incomplete state of our Icnowledge 

 on the subject, it is not surprising that the opinions of writers 

 differ very markedly from one another. There is, on the one hand, 

 the group which takes a distinctly pessimistic view, and sees prac- 

 tically no hope whatever. Those who belong in this group are mostly 

 men who expressed their opinions many years ago, before the days 

 of the modern study of tropical medicine and of tropical sanitation. 

 In the second category we find those who believe that acclimatization 

 is merely a question of overcoming disease; who look forward to a 

 rapid elimination of all tropical diseases, and who do not regard the 

 effects of the physiological disturbances of any special significance. 

 Writers of a third group fully recognize the progress made in the 

 warfare on tropical disease but do not, even in their most optimistic 

 moments, see the disappearance of tropical diseases which are such a 

 tremendous handicap to white settlement in the Tropics. They be- 

 lieve th'&t, entirely apart from the presence or absence of disease, hot, 

 damp tropical climates liave a deleterious influence upon white men, 

 especially upon white women and children, which operates and will 

 operate as an apparently insuperable obstacle to the complete 

 acclimatization of our race in the Tropics. 



It will help to understand the views of these three groups of writers 

 if we quote briefly. Alfred Russell Wallace held the view that true 

 acclimatization is impossible. "An Englishman," he said, " who 

 can only live in Rome by sleeping in a tower and never venturing 

 forth at night can not be said to be truly acclimated." The older 

 generation will easily remember the days when cautious travelers 

 in Italy never accepted a room on the ground floor of a hotel, and 

 always came in before sunset. Those were, of course, the days when 

 malaria was rampant on the Roman campagna, and experience had 

 shown that what was called " Roman fever " was " caught " oftenest 

 by those who were out in the evening, and who had rooms near the 

 ground. The correct explanation is, of course, to be found in the 

 fact that the malaria-bearing mosquito is nocturnal in its habits, 

 and usually does not fly far above the ground. Those were the days 

 when life on the equatorial west coast of Africa was a very dangerous 

 and uncertain business. The doggerel, " the Bight of Benin, and few 

 come out that ever go in," was a common way of expressing the 

 serious risk of landing in the Bight of Benin, the body of water 



