276 Timehri. 
refers to a state of things that existed when the new coun:ries were first 
discovered but which bas now passed away. There is nothing strange in 
the North not having up-to-date information on a topical question. 
The number of people in Europe and North America who are interested 
in the tropics is small. The number who are sufficiently interested to 
study handbooks on the subject of the distribution of tropical population 
is negligible. No such handbooks are published therefore, and a great 
wastage of the tropical populations has taken place without attracting 
the notice of the Northern peoples. This wastage has been the outcome 
of the meeting between the white races and the wild races with whom 
they came in contact during the great era of discovery in the 15th and 
16th centuries. This is not mere hypothesis ; it lies entombed in eare- 
fully collected and tabulated statistics published in every Department of 
Public Health in America, Australia, and Polynesia, with which I as 
a layman am unfamiliar. For what follows, therefore, I am indebted to 
a chapter entitled “‘ Bacteria as Empire Builders ” in a book on Heredity 
written by Dr. Archdall Reid and published in 1905. The doctor lays it 
down that a migrating race armed with a new and deadly disease and 
with high powers of resisting it possesses a terrible weapon of offence. 
Here is some of the evidence he produces in support of that statement :— 
“The ancient condition of the Old World was reproduced in the New. 
Again we read of plague and pestilence, of water and air-borne diseases, 
coming and going in great epidemics, and of the famines that followed. 
Measles, and in later times, cholera piled the earth with dead. The part 
played by smallpox was even greater. When taken to the West Indies in 
1507 whole tribes were exterminated. A few years later it quite de- 
populated San Domingo. In Mexico it destroyed three and a half millions 
of people. Prescod describes this first great epidemic as sweeping over the 
land like fire over the prairies, smiting prince and peasant, and leaving its 
path strewn with the dead bodies of the natives, who (in the strong lan- 
guage of a contemporary) perished in heaps like cattle stricken with 
murrain. In 1841 Catling writes of the United States:—Thirty millions 
of white men are now scuffling for the goods and luxuries of life 
over the bones of twelve millions of red men, six millions of whom 
have fallen victims of smallpox. But the principal part was played 
by tuberculosis. Air and water-borne diseases generally left immune 
a remnant, but against tuberculosis no immunity could be acquired. 
Red Indians and Caribs could not in a few generations achieve an evolu- 
tion which the inhabitants of the Old World had accomplished only 
after thousands of years and the cost of hundreds of millions of 
INVES veruicm ofset The following is an example of the manner in which tuber- 
culosis went to work. The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some 
400 when the smallpox came and reduced it by one-fourth, Six months 
later a woman developed tubercular consumption ; the disease spread like 
fire about the valley and in loss than a year two survivors, a man and a 
woman, fled from the newly-created solitude.” 
Mr. Ireland’s statement refers to the conditions of to-day after this 
great slaughter had taken place. European and American ideas are & 
survival of the stories the early discoverers brought back with them 
of lands teeming with people. 
