Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/527

Rh prospered, though unequally. There are also some young colonies founded by Germans on the Rio Grande, in Brazil, which a fancy still needing confirmation has placed in the rank of healthful countries and suitable for our people. Reviewing the results that have been obtained in the colonies thus briefly enumerated, which embrace the sum of the more or less fortunate enterprises of the kind, we see that their success has been in inverse proportion to the difference in isothermic latitude between them and the mother-country of the colonists. But in every case it is not probable that the organization of the colonists has escaped having to pay, at the expense of profound alterations, for acclimatization in foreign countries. Men of science, as well as tourists, have been interested for many years in the study of the Yankee type, which, according to the general opinion, is not wholly comparable either with the English or the German, or with a cross of the two with the Irish race. The peculiar physiology of the Yankee is yet to be made out, and I can not insist too strongly on the great value of the scientific results that might accrue from the study of this delicate ethnological problem. It is averred that the transformations of this type grow more pronounced as we go from the Northern to the Southern States.

It sometimes occurs that a population transplanted into a distant country remains apparently stationary. Nothing seems to distinguish it from the compatriots which it has left in its native country. But, on regarding it more closely, we find that there is operating within it one of the gravest phenomena in the history of colonization—a phenomenon which has been long observed in animals and plants when transported to new climates: a decrease of fecundity and an arrest of development, going at length to the complete elimination of posterity. It is evident that the condition most essential to the prosperity of a colony, the only guarantee of its longevity, resides in the number of children in the families of the settlers; children who, in their turn, the source of posterity, lead, as at home, to the branching out of every family into numerous ramifications. The further we advance into exotic climates, the more rapidly does the diminution of the reproductive faculty of the colonist go on, the more do statistics indicate a reduction in the number of births and an increasing sterility in successive generations. This fact has been noticed not only by doctors, who have called attention to it from time immemorial, but persons also who could have no prejudice in the matter—statesmen, military men, literary men, and men of every profession and every country, and those who lived in times when the question had not yet begun to be the order of the day—have observed for the most diverse countries that families formerly fertile, but who contracted alliances exclusively with natives of the exotic countries, lasted only a few generations.

It has never been possible, even to this day, to establish a durable colonization in British India. It has, indeed, been said recently that