Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/317

Rh documents, as positive as the charts on which we rely in writing the history of our middle ages.

These people came from Asia, from a point of the Indian Archipelago that we can determine approximately. They reached the Marquesas Isles in the beginning of our era, or in the years immediately preceding. We know with still greater certainty that the emigration to New Zealand, that is to say, to the most distant portion of Polynesia, took place in the beginning of the fifteenth century, and that the emigration from New Zealand to people the Isles of Chatham occurred scarcely a century ago.

Here we meet with a significant fact. When these emigrants established themselves in the islands of which we are speaking, they found them deserted. This circumstance singularly facilitated their new settlement. If the Calmucks, of whom I just sketched the history, suffered so much, it is because they found men on their route. In our day, if it is still difficult to traverse Africa—if the journey from Timbuctoo has cost the lives of so many courageous travellers—it is because the Tuaregs close the passage to us.

The more we study, the better we know that all over the surface of the globe man surmounts every difficulty, so long as he wars only against Nature. If he is arrested, it is when he encounters man. In a word, man alone can arrest man.

I wish to say a few words also on the last of the questions suggested by this subject.

Man, we have seen, took his departure from a particular place on the globe, and now he is everywhere. Consequently, in his long and multiplied journeyings, he has encountered climates the most extreme, and conditions of existence the most opposite. He has adapted himself to all. Does it follow that a new-comer, that a European for example, can establish himself anywhere on the globe and immediately prosper there? You know he cannot. He must become acclimated; and you can easily understand that it ought to be so. The human body, which has developed under certain conditions of existence, is in harmony with them. If they change, and above all if they change suddenly, it is evident that the entire organism receives a shock; and this shock brings with it suffering, that you know often ends in death.

Experience has shown that these sufferings have been more grave and frequent when the course of emigration has been from cold toward warm countries—whence a certain number of physicians and anthropologists have drawn the conclusion that there are some countries on the globe that the European cannot inhabit—in which he can never prosper and multiply Some have even gone further. They have maintained that men could only propagate where they were born; so that, in reality, the Frenchman can only live in France, the Englishman in England, the Dutch in Holland, etc.

This exaggeration needs no refutation. It is already refuted by 20