Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/307

Rh authority adds, to the carelessness and shiftlessness of a class of people who have been suddenly thrown upon their resources, and have been withdrawn from the protection and consideration of a race more intelligent than themselves."—Hirsch, vol. iii. pp. 225–8.

But the fact remains, that notwithstanding their high death-rate from tuberculosis, negroes are able to exist and multiply in contact with Europeans, while the races of the New World are not so able. The deathrates of the latter then grow so high that they tend to become extinct. Natives of the crowded city-studded peninsula of India, though less resistant than the inhabitants of less crowded but much colder Europe, are more resistant than the negroes, as the following paragraph proves:—

"I pass now to another disease, phthisis, of which the increase in this colony is undoubted, and so far progressive. This increase has received notice more than once, and very fully, in a paper by Dr. Ferguson in the hospital reports. I wish to direct attention especially to a phase of its local development, which is also noticed by Dr. Ferguson—the different clinical history which the disease presents as it occurs in the two races forming the largest proportion of our very mixed populations. Amongst the blacks the disease, considered from the clinical side, is generally of the rapid, acute form known as 'galloping consumption'; or, looking at it from a pathological point of view, it presents in that race the form of tubercular caseous pneumonia. The phthisical East Indian, on the other hand, presents the clinical characteristics of the slower and more variable forms, or, speaking pathologically, suffers most commonly from tubercular interstitial pneumonia or peri-bronchitis. Now, why this difference? We have as yet no reason to doubt that the bacillus of the disease is in both instances alike, but this is a matter which it would be interesting: to have settled by direct observation.