124 PHYSICAL INVESTIGATION. [PART I. 



one in 900 reaches the age of 100 years. 1 Even among 

 the Hottentots instances of great age frequently occur. 

 Moody 2 mentions a case of one who, from his recollections of 

 former governors of the colony, could not be less than 150 

 years old. 



It is not our intention to give here a synopsis or history of 

 the diseases peculiar to different tribes and climates. It will 

 be sufficient for our subject to show that there appear to be no 

 diseases exclusively peculiar to either of the races of man, 

 although the frequency and mortality of many of them differ in 

 various nations, according to individual predisposition, diet, 

 climate, and medical treatment. Even Nott, who appears to 

 have availed himself of every circumstance to prove that the 

 various races suffer from different specific diseases, was obliged 

 to content himself with the existence of different predisposi- 

 tions. Thus at first, he thought to find a proof for the specific 

 difference of the Negro from the European in the circumstance 

 that Negroes and the coloured population enjoy almost an im- 

 munity from yellow fever, so fatal to the White not yet 

 acclimated in the south-western parts of North America. He 

 has, however, now partly abandoned this opinion, 3 and admits 

 that Indians and their mongrels in New Orleans and Florida 

 are as much subject to the attacks of yellow fever as the Whites 

 from the North of Europe. He still however maintains that 

 the liability to contract yellow fever differs essentially in the 

 Negro and the WTiite. We must object that this does not 

 depend upon a peculiarity of race, but upon the influence of 

 climate, for as regards the acclimated Whites in the West 

 Indies, the French refugees, for instance, who fled from St. 

 Domingo to the Continent, the yellow fever was no more 

 injurious to them than to the Negroes. 4 An opposite example 

 is furnished by the Negroes of the third and fourth generation, 

 who, after having been acclimatized in North America had 

 returned to Africa, when they became subject to the same 



1 Graf Gorz, " E. urn die Welt/' ii, p. 44. 



2 Loc. cit., i, p. 288. 



3 " Indigenous races/' p. 392, Philad., 1857. 



4 Stanhope Smith, p. 281. 



