TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 705 



of caiTyiug out an investigation likely to provide results of the highest import- 

 ance. 



But there are other special problems connected with this, the most backward 

 and the most repellent of continents, which demand serious investigation, problems 

 essentially geographical. One of the most important of these, from the point of 

 view of the development of Africa, is the problem of acclimatisation. The matter 

 is of such prime importance that a committee of the Association has been at work 

 for some years collecting data as to the climate of Tropical Africa. In a general 

 way we know that that climate is hot and the rainfall scanty ; indeed, even the 

 geographers of the Ancient World believed that Central Africa was uninhabitable 

 on account of its heat. But science requires more than generalities, and therefore 

 we look forward to the exact results which are being collected by the Committee 

 referred to with much hope. We can only go to work experimentally until we 

 kttow precisely what we have to deal with. It will help us greatly to solve the 

 problem of acclimatisation when we have the exact factors that go to constitute 

 the climate of Tropical Africa. At present there is no doubt that the weight of 

 competent opinion — that is, the opinion of those who have had actual experience 

 of African climate, and of those who have made a special study of the effects of 

 that climate on the human constitution — is that though white men, if they take 

 due precautions, may live and do certain kinds of work in Tropical Africa, it will 

 never be possible to colonise that part of the world with people from the temperate 

 rone. This is the lesson taught by generations of experience of Europeans in 

 India. So far, also, sad experience has shown that white people cannot hope to 

 settle in Central Africa as they have settled in Canada and the United States 

 and in Australia, and make it a nursery and a home for new generations. 

 Even in such favourable situations as Blantyre, a lofty region on the south of 

 Lake Nyasa, children cannot be reared beyond a certain age ; they must be sent 

 home to England, otherwise they will degenerate physically and morally. No 

 country can ever become the true home of a people if the children have to be sent 

 away to be reared. Still, it is true our experience in Africa is limited. It has 

 been maintained that it might be possible to adapt Europeans to Tropical Africa 

 by a gradual process of migration. Transplant Southern Europeans to North 

 Africa ; after a generation or two remove their progeny further south, and so on, 

 edging the succeeding generation further and further into the heart of the conti- 

 nent. The experiment — a long one it would be — might be tried ; but it is to be 

 feared that the ultimate result would be a race deprived of all those characteristics 

 which have made Europe what it is. An able young Italian physician, Dr. Samboa, 

 has recently faced this important problem, and has not hesitated to come to con- 

 clusions quite opposed to those generally accepted. His position is that it has 

 taken us centuries in Europe to discover our hidden enemies, the microbes of the 

 various diseases to which Northern humanity is a prey, and to meet them and 

 coiiquer them. In Africa we have a totally different set of enemies to meet, from 

 lions and snakes down to the invisible organisms that produce those forms of 

 malaria, anaemia, and other diseases characteristic of tropical countxies. He 

 admits that these are more or less due to heat, to the nature of the soil, and other 

 tropical conditions, but that if once we knew their precise nature and modes of 

 working we should be in a position to meet them and conquer them. It may be 

 so, but this is a result that could only be reached after generations of experience 

 and investigation ; and even Dr. Sambon admits that the ultimate product of 

 European acclimatisation in Africa would be something quite different from the 

 European progenitors. What is wanted is a series of carefully-conducted experi- 

 ments. I have referred to the Blantyre highlands ; in British East Africa there 

 are plateaus of much greater altitude, and in other parts of Central Africa there 

 are large areas of 4,000 feet and over above sea-level. The world may become so 

 full that we may be forced to try to utilise these lofty tropical regions as homes for 

 white people when Canada and Australia and the United States become over-popu- 

 iated. As one of my predecessors in this chair (Mr. Ravenstein) tried to show at the 

 Leeds Meeting some years ago, the population of the world will have more than 

 doubled in a century, and about 180 years hence will have quadrupled. At any rate, 



1897. z z 



