DECREASE OP THE ABORIGINES. 219 



of service to the defeated side, for the runaway 

 warriors took refuge in the barracks. 



The number of aborigines is rapidly decreasing. 

 [n my whole ride, with the exception of some boys 

 brought up by Englishmen, I saw only one other 

 party. This decrease, no doubt, must be partly 

 owing to the introduction of spirits, to European 

 diseases (even the milder ones of which, such as 

 the measles,* prove very destructive), and to the 

 gradual extinction of the wild animals. It is said 

 that numbers of their children invariably perish in 

 very early infancy from the effects of their wander- 

 ing life ; and as the difficulty of procuring food in- 

 creases, so must their wandering habits increase ; 

 and hence the population, without any apparent 

 deaths from famine, is repressed in a manner ex- 

 tremely sudden compared to what happens in civ- 

 ilized countz-ies, where the father, though in adding 

 to his labour he may injure himself, does not de- 

 stroy his offspring. 



Besides these several evident causes of destnic- 

 tion, there appears to be some more mysteiious 

 agency generally at work. Wherever the Euro- 

 pean has trod, death seems to pursue the aborigi- 

 nal. We may look to the wide extent of the 

 Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and 

 Australia, and we find the same result. Nor is it 

 the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer ; 

 the Polynesian of Malay extraction has, in parts of 

 the East Indian Archipelago, thus driven before 

 him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of 



* It is remarkable how the same disease is modified in different 

 climates. At the little island of St. Helena, the introduction of 

 scarlet fever is dreaded as a plague. In some countries, foreign- 

 ers and natives are as differently affected by certain contagious 

 disorders as if they had been different animals ; of which fact 

 some instances have occurred in Chile, and, according to Hum- 

 boldt, in Mexico. (PoUt. Essay, New Spain, vol. iv ) 



