Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/312

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

settlement, as in Algeria and Madagascar, throughout the south seas and the far East. Sometimes, it must be sadly confessed, they make settlement practicable by emasculating the natives, as the Jesuits the Hurons and English missionaries the Maoris. But none of these classes are by themselves colonizers. They do not permanently settle, and the missionaries are as jealous as the fur traders of the advance of European occupation. Many of them, in North America and New Zealand, have advocated and encouraged the most fatal of all measures to a true colony—the formation of a race of half-breeds.

Hunting passes into pastoral pursuits by the domestication of the animals captured, as slavery arises out of war. The Greek colony of Cyrênê and its offshoots, Barka and Hesperides, were stock colonies; but the first settlers being exclusively men, they intermarried with the natives, and the true colonization dates from a later settlement of both sexes. The drovers of reindeer and the pastoralists of the Alps are in like manner male groups. Cattle-breeding northern Australia is still in the polyandrous condition of having ten men to one woman, and that was probably near the ratio of the sexes in the early days of the country. It is apparently the same on the estancias of Brazil, and Darwin states that "these Spanish colonies do not carry within themselves the elements of growth." Yet they lay the foundations for normal societies. What Bancroft says of the herdsmen of Carolina is true of all countries: they are "the pioneers of colonization in the wilderness." Sheep colonies, like New South Wales, are a stage nearer complete self-propagating societies than cattle colonies like Queensland. Shepherds and shearers are long semi-nomadic, and the squatter is sometimes the only family man; but villages grow up at the confluence of grazing runs to supply necessaries, shoe horses, build and repair, bait and accommodate. The "station" and its lord may be the true social nucleus, but expansion arises from the village with its families and rudimentary industrial organization.

The most advanced and most potent of all the pioneer types of colony alone remains to be mentioned. The mining colony is not a modern invention. Phœnician Cadiz and Græco-Italian Cumæ were, the one commercial and the other agricultural as well. But Athenian Amphipolis, with its auriferous and argentiferous mountains, must have been settled for its mines, and barren Thasos, like the adjacent Thracian mainland, must have been colonized by the Phoenicians, as afterward by the Greeks, for its gold mines alone. Gold discoveries on a great scale are nevertheless modern and characterize two of the three great epochs of colonization. The South American exodus of the sixteenth century and the Australian and African rushes of the nineteenth have this feature in common that