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318 gun. Many do, of course, get a limited benefit in the change of subjects of thought, but they often mistake change of feeling due to excitement for recuperation. We need to learn how to stop. Instead of rushing across the face of the earth in the delusive hope of finding health on the other side, we need to learn how to sit down and make ourselves comfortable where we are. A man who had lived to a great age in health and contentment was asked to give some simple rule of life out of his experience. In reply, he said, "The only rule I can give is, 'Always keep comfortable'" I feel confident that a well-selected residence in the tropics from time to time will prove helpful in acquiring habits of reposefulness. Tropical heat is not oppressive, as many who have not tried it seem to suppose. It is very different from the same-temperature as indicated by the thermometer during a northern summer. One does not fret about the tropical heat as he is apt to do here, but is inclined to keep quiet, lie down and sleep a good deal during the daytime as well as profoundly all night. Wakefulness is a rarity. The relief from nervous tension and irritability is inexpressibly delightful. The increased action of the skin relieves and gives needed rest to overworked kidneys, the air passages are bathed by a moist, bland, nonirritating, warm air, no chilly draughts scourge the nerve centers into activities wasteful of energy, morbid appetites are allayed, digestion is improved in sympathy with increased skin activity, and the poor invalid begins to feel that, after all, life may be worth living. It is a delusion, born of constant assertions of the advocates of negro slavery before the war, that white people can not work in the tropics. The island of Porto Rico was originally settled by Catalonian peasants, and the major part of the farm labor has from the beginning till now—say for approaching four hundred years—been done by white men. True, negro slavery was introduced there, but of a milder type than in the other islands; and the blacks never amounted to much more than one third of the population, and they rapidly mixed with their Spanish colaborers beside whom they worked. The facts are still more startling in regard to the Spanish Main. Along the coasts of Central America the mahogany cutters, called "Indians" are mostly of mixed negro blood; and along the unhealthy shores of the Magdalen a River, or wherever the sugar cane is cultivated, negro slaves were introduced, and their descendants, largely mixed with the Indian race, still remain. Even in Brazil the negroes and their descendants are confined to a few provinces, and never to exclude white labor; and in numbers the African blood constitutes but a small proportion of the ten or twelve millions in that country—certainly not enough to influence the following statement: From the southern border of the United States through Mexico, the