Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/528

514 it is possible, by means of severe hygienic processes, successfully to bring up an English generation there; but to do this the children have, as soon as they are able to support the journey, say at five or six years of age, to be taken to the mountains and left there till they are fifteen or sixteen years old. This reminds me of the palm-trees which we succeed in making bear fruit in our gardens. Because, by the use of the most elaborate horticulture we can occasionally cause a plant of the most delicate species to mature its fruit, shall we venture to regard the palm-tree as acclimated in our country? No more can we assert as much of a population which has no chance of maintaining itself except by taking all its children to the mountains and not allowing them to come down thence till they are mature men. A curious kind of family life that, and extremely costly if it were undertaken, the results of which are limited to bringing down the young generation, which is destined to live in the country, from the north to the south, from the mountains to the plain, like the ancient kings of Persia. But the indefatigable perseverance which has been applied for years in organizing this system does not in any way look to the colonization of India. It only seeks to create a new higher class, an aristocracy, which shall be better qualified to govern the country than annual new arrivals from England. I will also observe that the Dutch in Java and their other Eastern establishments have not advanced the problem a step. Every considerable family endeavors to send its children as soon as possible not merely to the mountains, but to Europe, more for physical conservation than for education. As a whole, these attempts at colonization singularly remind us of the fate of the Lombards in Italy. Those people, it is true, survived a little longer on the conquered territory; but very few centuries were sufficient to reduce them to the state of hardly appreciable vestiges. And for the Goths, it did not require a hundred years to annihilate them completely in that same Italy. Minute statistical researches have, it is true, quite recently brought to light here and there a few traces of the Lombards, and it is in a similar way not improbable that there may still exist in the country a very little of the ancient Germanic blood; but in upper Italy there does not remain any well-defined posterity; and in the northern provinces of Portugal and Spain, where the Visigoths reigned in all their power, it would be just as useless to look for any clearly appreciable posterity of the conquerors. I was recently accused of not being willing to range Italy and Spain among the countries favorable to the settlement of families originating in the lands of the North. I am sorry for it, but I can not perceive any facts that make it probable that our countrymen can settle in those states with any expectation of leaving an enduring posterity. I am ready to bow to the proof when it is brought forward. I would also suggest to our physicians of the navy and the merchant marine, and to all who travel for any purpose, that it would be a profitable task to prepare in the most