DISEASE IN THE NEW WORLD 279 



To them came Eastern civilization, not by slow degrees, as it had 

 dawned on the inhabitants of the Old World, but suddenly, and, 

 in its consequences, fearfully. The aborigines could not in a few 

 generations achieve an evolution which the Europeans had accom- 

 plished only during the lapse of thousands of years and at a cost of 

 millions of lives. 



463. At once the very ancient conditions of the Old World 

 were reproduced. Air- and water-borne diseases began to sweep in 

 great waves of pestilence over the whole vast regions of the West. 

 The entire population was susceptible ; and, therefore, almost 

 every individual was stricken down. Each disease took its toll of 

 victims, and then, its nutritive supply exhausted, passed, but only 

 to return after intervals of years in the same epidemic form. 

 Towns and cities of the European type, foci of endemic disease, 

 arose on the seaboard, extended into the interior, and provided 

 the starting-point of fresh epidemics. Measles, cholera, and 

 especially smallpox, penetrated into remote prairies and forests, 

 and piled the earth with the dead. Since the invasion by 

 Europeans was rapid, and the aborigines had achieved no ante- 

 cedent evolution, the epidemics were more frequent than anciently 

 in the Eastern Hemisphere, and more deadly in their effects. 

 Whole tribes and nations were exterminated. 1 



464. The part played by tuberculosis, though less striking and 

 obvious, and therefore less noticed by historians, was even greater. 

 Prevailing mainly in the North and South, in the neighbourhood 

 of European settlements and missionary establishments, it spread 

 with their extension into the interior and swept the land quite 

 bare of its native inhabitants. It completed the destruction, begun 

 by air- and water-borne diseases, of the natives even of the tropical 

 West Indian Islands and parts of the adjacent mainland, especially 

 in the neighbourhood of mines, in which aborigines were forced to 

 labour and where the malady prevailed to a terrible extent. But 

 in the mainland of tropical America, where the great forests were 

 defended by malaria which prevented white settlement, and by 

 heat which necessitated the building of airy dwellings, it did com- 

 paratively little harm. Moreover, the whites intermarried with the 

 aborigines, and the mixed race which resulted, inheriting in half 

 measure powers of resisting both malaria and tuberculosis, seems, 

 as in Mexico, destined to survive. In North America and in the 

 open pampas about the river Plate, the work of extermination was 

 more thorough. Many unions occurred between the whites and 



1 Hirsch, vol. i. p. 136. 



