the same local diseases as other unacclimatized individuals. He well remarked that the debility and sickening of Europeans in many tropical countries are wrongly ascribed to the climate, but are rather the consequences of indolence, sensual gratification and an irregular mode of life. Thus the English, who cannot give up animal food and spirituous liquors, are less able to sustain the heat of the tropics than the more sober Spaniards and Portuguese. The excessive mortality of European troops in India, and the delicacy of the children of European parents, do not affect the real question of acclimatization under proper conditions. They only show that acclimatization is in most cases necessary, not that it cannot take place. The best examples of partial or complete acclimatization are to be found where European races have permanently settled in the tropics, and have maintained themselves for several generations. There are, however, two sources of inaccuracy to be guarded against, and these are made the most of by the writers above referred to, and are supposed altogether to invalidate results which are otherwise opposed to their views. In the first place, we have the possibility of a mixture of native blood having occurred; in the second, there have almost always been a succession of immigrants from the parent country, who continually intermingle with the families of the early settlers. It is maintained that one or other of these mixtures is absolutely necessary to enable Europeans to continue long to flourish in the tropics.
There are, however, certain cases in which the sources of error above mentioned are reduced to a minimum, and cannot seriously affect the results; such as those of the Jews, the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope and in the Moluccas, and the Spaniards in South America.
The Jews are a good example of acclimatization, because they have been established for many centuries in climates very different from that of their native land; they keep themselves almost wholly free from intermixture with the people around them; and they are often so populous in a country that the intermixture with Jewish immigrants from other lands cannot seriously affect the local purity of the race. They have, for instance, attained a population of millions in such severe climates as Poland and Russia; in the towns of Algeria they have succeeded so conspicuously as to bring about an outburst of anti-semitism; and in Cochin-China and Aden they succeed in rearing children and forming permanent communities.
In some of the hottest parts of South America Europeans are perfectly acclimatized, and where the race is kept pure it seems to be even improved. Some very valuable notes on this subject were furnished to the present writer by the well-known botanist, Richard Spruce, who resided many years in South America, but who was prevented by ill-health from publishing his researches (see A. R. Wallace, Notes of a Botanist, 1908). As a careful, judicious and accurate observer, both of man and nature, he had few superiors. He says:
The white inhabitants of Guayaquil (lat. 2° 13′ S.) are kept pure by careful selection. The slightest tincture of red or black blood bars entry into any of the old families who are descendants of Spaniards from the Provincias Vascongadas or those bordering the Bay of Biscay, where the morals are perhaps the purest (as regards the intercourse of the sexes) of any in Europe, and where for a girl, even of the poorest class, to have a child before marriage is the rarest thing possible. The consequence of this careful breeding is, that the women of Guayaquil are considered (and justly) the finest along the whole Pacific coast. They are often tall, sometimes very handsome, decidedly healthy, although pale, and assuredly prolific enough. Their sons are big, stout men, but when they lead inactive lives are apt to become fat and sluggish. Those of them, however, who have farms in the savannahs and are accustomed to take long rides in all weathers, and those whose trade obliges them to take frequent journeys in the mountainous interior, or even to Europe and North America, are often as active and as little burdened with superfluous flesh as a Scotch farmer.
The oldest Christian town in Peru is Piura (lat. 5° S.), which was founded by Pizarro himself. The climate is very hot, especially in the three or four months following the southern solstice. In March 1843 the temperature only once fell as low as 83° during the whole month, the usual lowest night temperature being 85°. Yet people of all colours find it very healthy, and the whites are very prolific. I resided in the town itself nine months, and in the neighbourhood seven months more. The population (in 1863–1864) was about 10,000, of which not only a considerable proportion was white, but was mostly descended from the first emigrants after the conquest. Purity of descent was not, however, quite so strictly maintained as at Guayaquil. The military adventurers, who have often risen to high or even supreme rank in Peru, have not seldom been of mixed race, and fear or favour has often availed to procure them an alliance with the oldest and purest-blooded families.
These instances, so well stated by Spruce, seem to demonstrate the complete acclimatization of Spaniards in some of the hottest parts of South America. Although we have here nothing to do with mixed races, yet the want of fertility in these has been often taken to be a fact inherent in the mongrel race, and has been also sometimes held to prove that neither the European nor his half-bred offspring can maintain themselves in the tropics. The following observation is therefore of interest:—
At Guayaquil for a lady of good family—married or unmarried—to be of loose morals is so uncommon, that when it does happen it is felt as a calamity by the whole community. But here, and perhaps in most other towns in South America, a poor girl of mixed race—especially if good-looking—rarely thinks of marrying one of her own class until she has—as the Brazilians say—“approveitada de sua mocidade” (made the most of her youth) in receiving presents from gentlemen. If she thus bring a good dowry to her husband, he does not care to inquire, or is not sensitive, about the mode in which it was acquired. The consequence of this indiscriminate sexual intercourse, especially if much prolonged, is to diminish, in some cases to paralyse, the fertility of the female. And as among people of mixed race it is almost universal, the population of these must fall off both in numbers and quality.
The following example of divergent acclimatization of the same race to hot and cold zones is very interesting, and will conclude our extracts from Spruce’s valuable notes:—
One of the most singular cases connected with this subject that have fallen under my own observation, is the difficulty, or apparent impossibility, of acclimatizing the Red Indian in a certain zone of the Andes. Any person who has compared the physical characters of the native races of South America must be convinced that these have all originated in a common stirps. Many local differences exist, but none capable of invalidating this conclusion. The warmth yet shade-loving Indian of the Amazon; the Indian of the hot, dry and treeless coasts of Peru and Guayaquil, who exposes his bare head to the sun with as much zest as an African negro; the Indian of the Andes, for whom no cold seems too great, who goes constantly barelegged and often bare-headed, through whose rude straw hut the piercing wind of the paramos sweeps and chills the white man to the very bones;—all these, in the colour and texture of the skin, the hair and other important features, are plainly of one and the same race.
Now there is a zone of the equatorial Andes, ranging between about 4000 and 6000 feet altitude, where the very best flavoured coffee is grown, where cane is less luxuriant but more saccharine than in the plains, and which is therefore very desirable to cultivate, but where the red man sickens and dies. Indians taken down from the sierra get ague and dysentery. Those of the plains find the temperature chilly, and are stricken down with influenza and pains in the limbs. I have seen the difficulty experienced in getting farms cultivated in this zone, on both sides of the Cordillera. The permanent residents are generally limited to the major-domo and his family; and in the dry season labourers are hired, of any colour that can be obtained—some from the low country, others from the highlands—for three, four, or five months, who gather in and grind the cane, and plant for the harvest of the following year; but the staff of resident Indian labourers, such as exists in the farms of the sierra, cannot be kept up in the Yungas, as these half-warm valleys are called. White men, who take proper precautions, and are not chronically soaked with cane-spirit, stand the climate perfectly, but the creole whites are still too much caballeros to devote themselves to agricultural work.
In what is now the republic of Ecuador, the only peopled portions are the central valley, between the two ridges of the Andes—height 7000 to 12,000 feet—and the hot plain at their western base; nor do the wooded slopes appear to have been inhabited, except by scattered savage hordes, even in the time of the Incas. The Indians of the highlands are the descendants of others who have inhabited that region exclusively for untold ages; and a similar affirmation may be made of the Indians of the plain. Now, there is little doubt that the progenitors of both these sections came from a temperate region (in North America); so that here we have one moiety acclimatized to endure extreme heat, and the other extreme cold; and at this day exposure of either to the opposite extreme (or even, as we have seen, to the climate of an intermediate zone) is always pernicious and often fatal. But if this great difference has been brought about in the red man, might not the same have happened to the white man? Plainly it might, time being given; for one cannot doubt that the inherent adaptability is the same in both, or (if not) that the white man possesses it in a higher degree.
