Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/734

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

where the site was originally located the remains of the vessels were found.

These two islands are virtual archaeological treasure houses which, when thoroughly examined, will undoubtedly produce many interesting finds.

ACCLIMATIZATION.

By WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY,

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS IN THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.

THERE is no question of greater significance for European civilization than the one which concerns the possibility of its extension over that major part of the earth which is yet the home of barbarism or savagery. The rapid increase of the Aryan populations is more and more forcing it to the forefront as a great economic problem. No longer is it merely a scientific and abstract problem of secondary importance as contributory to the theories of the unity or plurality of the human race.[1] It has today become a matter of peculiar significance for the present generation of men, and the old abstractions, which did so much to confuse its students, are laid aside.[2] The substantial unity of the species having become an accepted fact along with the doctrine of evolution, the migration and consequent acclimatization of the various branches of the parent stock follow as a matter of course. The modern problem plainly stated is this: First, can a single generation of European emigrants live? and, secondly, living, can they perpetuate their kind in the equatorial regions of the earth? Finally, if the Aryan race is able permanently so to sustain itself, will it still be able to preserve its peculiar civilization in these lands; or must it revert to the barbarian stage of modern slavery—of a servile native population, which alone in those climates can work and live? An area of fertile lands six times as great as that cultivated by the people of Europe to-day stands waiting to absorb its surplus population.[3] But its point of saturation


  1. Revue mensuelle de l'École d'Anthropologie, i, p. 129; Virchow, in Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, 1885, p. 202.
  2. The French distinction between "acclimatement" and "acclimatation" is practically an illustration of these two phases of the question. Vide Bulletin de la Societé d'Anthropologie, Paris, V, p. 781. Our National Department of Agriculture has become so impressed with the importance of this matter that special investigations are being prosecuted, and a climatological journal is promised.
  3. In Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, January, 1891, p. 27, are maps, reproduced from a paper by Mr. Ravenstein before the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Leeds, of lands open for settlement. Vide also map in Transactions of the Seventh International Congress of Demography and Hygiene, x, opp. p. 163, of lands im-