302 THE PRESENT EVOLUTION OF MAN — PHYSICAL 



by excessive privations, and their powers of resistance 

 were thereby broken down. Forty per cent, of the 

 Garde Mobile, and of the troops returned from Italy, 

 who took the disease, died, but I am not aware that 

 any European army, in however evil case, ever lost 

 through measles one-fifth of its total strength, as did iu 

 South America the " National Army," among the ranks 

 of which there were presumably many individuals of 

 Indian or mixed blood. No records exist showing that 

 Old World communities, however unfavourably circum- 

 stanced or however savage, have ever suffered like " the 

 natives on the banks of the Amazon, where the number 

 of those that died of the sickness was reckoned at 

 80,000, whole tribes having been cut off; also in Astoria 

 in 1829, where nearly half of the natives fell victims to 

 the disease." Nothing of the kind has been known to 

 happen in Africa, for example, in the latitude of the 

 Amazon, in countries where the natives are fully as 

 savage as the South American Indians. In the examples 

 quoted, Hirsch mentions only two instances in which 

 Old World races have suffered very severely, i.e. in 

 South Africa, the very extremity of the Old World, and 

 in Mauritius, an outlying island; and the mere fact 

 that measles proved so death-dealing on a sudden in 

 those lands, proves that the races inhabiting them must 

 have been but little afflicted by the disease, since com- 

 paratively so few individuals can have acquired im- 

 munity through infection and recovery in childhood, as 

 so many of us in Europe do. As regards the epidemic 

 in Fiji, we may be permitted to doubt that in such a 

 latitude such a savage race dwells in "huts without 

 ventilation." Moreover, the Fijians, as well as the other 

 savage races mentioned, were attacked by the disease 

 when in normal health, and in an environment to which 

 Natural Selection had adapted them. The survival of 

 the fittest had inured them to their swamps and streams 



