THE PRESENT EVOLUTION OF MAN — PHYSICAL 263 



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 

 conqueroi-s. The famous Bishop Las Oasas pitied and 

 tried to save the remnant that were left. The Spanish 

 settlers required labourers for the plantations. On the 

 continent of Africa were another race, savage in their 

 natural state, which would domesticate like sheep and 

 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 every 

 observer on the spot. There is no more mystery con- 

 nected with their decay than with the extinction of the 

 dodo or the bison. It cannot be doubted that the New 

 World races have suffered or are suffering extinction in 

 consequence of the introduction among them of Old 

 World diseases, and because of one other cause, also an 

 importation, of which more hereafter. So much is quite 

 beyond dispute, and these causes may be seen in opera- 

 tion over half the world at the present day — in North 

 and South America, in Australia, in New Zealand, in 

 the islands of the Pacific, as well as in the Andamans, 

 and several other of the oceanic islands of the Eastern 

 Hemisphere. The sole mystery has lain in the circum- 

 stance that the races of the New World are less re- 

 sistant to diseases of the non-malarial type than those 

 of the Old World, and to that mystery I trust I have 

 furnished a key. It is no question of freedom or of 

 domestication, or even of civiUzation per se. The conti- 

 nental savages of the Old World do not perish when 

 brought into contact with civilization. In India and 

 Ceylon are tribes of an exceedingly wild type that have 



