THE PRESENT EVOLUTION OF MAN — PHYSICAL 295 



authority adds, to the carelessness and shiftlessness of a 

 class of people who have been suddenly thrown upon 

 their resources, and have been withdrawn from the 

 protection and consideration of a race more intelligent 

 than themselves." — Hirsch, vol. iii. pp. 225-8. 



But the fact remains, that notwithstanding their high 

 death-rate from tuberculosis, negroes are able to exist 

 and multiply in contact with Europeans, while the 

 races of the New World are not so able. The death- 

 rates of the latter then grow so high that they tend 

 to become extinct. Natives of the crowded city- 

 studded peninsula of India, though less resistant than 

 the inhabitants of less crowded but much colder 

 Europe, are more resistant than the negroes, as the 

 following paragraph proves : — 



" I pass now to another disease, phthisis, of which the 

 increase in this colony is undoubted, and so far 

 progressive. This increase has received notice more 

 than once, and very fully, in a paper by Dr. Ferguson 

 in the hospital reports. I wish to direct attention 

 especially to a phase of its local development, which is 

 also noticed by Dr. Ferguson — the different clinical 

 history which the disease presents as it occurs in the 

 two races forming the largest proportion of our very 

 mixed populations. Amongst the blacks the disease, 

 considered from the clinical side, is generally of the 

 rapid, acute form known as ' galloping consumption ' ; 

 or, looking at it from a pathological point of view, it 

 presents in that race the form of tubercular caseous 

 pneumonia^ The phthisical East Indian, on the other 

 hand, presents the clinical characteristics of the slower 

 and more variable forms, or, speaking pathologically, 

 suffers most commonly from tubercular interstitial 

 pneumonia or peri-bronchitis. Now, why this differ- 

 ence ? We have as yet no reason to doubt that the 

 bacillus of the disease is in both instances alike, but 

 this is a matter which it would be interesting to have 

 settled by direct observation. 



