Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/275

Rh like caged eagles, or disappear like the buffaloes of the prairies.

" Anyway, the natives perished out of the islands of the Caribbean Sea with a rapidity which startled the conquerors. The famous Bishop Las Casas pitied and tried to save the remnant that were left. The Spanish settlers required labourers for the plantations. On the continent of Africa were another race, savage in their natural state, which would domesticate like sheep and oxen, and learnt and improved in the white man's company."

These sentences are typical of much that has been written concerning the decay of the New World races. Almost all writers unite in speaking of it as mysterious, and yet the facts are patent, are manifest to every observer on the spot. There is no more mystery connected with their decay than with the extinction of the dodo or the bison. It cannot be doubted that the New World races have suffered or are suffering extinction in consequence of the introduction among them of Old World diseases, and because of one other cause, also an importation, of which more hereafter. So much is quite beyond dispute, and these causes may be seen in operation over half the world at the present day—in North and South America, in Australia, in New Zealand, in the islands of the Pacific, as well as in the Andamans, and several other of the oceanic islands of the Eastern Hemisphere. The sole mystery has lain in the circumstance that the races of the New World are less resistant to diseases of the non-malarial type than those of the Old World, and to that mystery I trust I have furnished a key. It is no question of freedom or of domestication, or even of civilization per se. The continental savages of the Old World do not perish when brought into contact with civilization. In India and Ceylon are tribes of an exceedingly wild type that have