44 A STUDY IN HEREDITY 



prosper and multiply; those that cannot live without freedom 

 pine like caged eagles, or disappear like the buffaloes of the 

 prairies. Anyway, the natives perished out of the islands of the 

 Caribbean Sea with a rapidity which startled the conquerors. 

 The famous Bishop Las Casas pitied and tried to save the 

 remnant that was left. The Spanish settlers required labourers 

 for the plantations. On the continent of Africa were another 

 race, savage in their natural state, which domesticated like oxen, 

 and learnt and improved in the white man's company.' 



These sentences are typical of much that has 

 been written concerning the decay of the New 

 World races. Almost all writers unite in speaking 

 of it as mysterious, and yet the facts are patent, 

 are manifest to any observer on the spot. There 

 is no more mystery connected with their decay 

 than with the extinction of the dodo and the bison. 

 It cannot be doubted that the New World races 

 have suffered, or are suffering, extinction in con- 

 sequence of the introduction of Old World diseases.^ 

 So much is quite beyond dispute, and these causes 

 may be seen in operation over half the world at 

 the present day — in North and South America, 



^ " The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred 

 when the small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six 

 months later, a woman developed tubercular consumption ; the disease 

 spread like fire about the valley, and in less than a year two survivors, 

 a man and a woman, fled from the newly-created solitude" . . . 

 " Early in the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, 

 a first case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen 

 persons, and by the month of August, when the tale was told' me, 

 one soul survived, and that was a boy who had been absent at his 

 schooling." " In the South Seas," p. 27, by Robert Louis Stevenson. 

 Chatto & Windus. 



