Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/331

Rh republics of Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chili, Paraguay, Uruguay, the larger part of Brazil, Argentina, down to Patagonia, with the exceptions above mentioned, there is not now and there never has been any farm labor but white farm labor since the settlement of that vast continent; and the widest portion is directly under the equator. I do not include the Indians in this statement, because when wild they do not work in the sense here meant, and when brought under the influence of the Spanish and Portuguese civilization they immediately mix with and become essentially one with their white coworkers. I do not deny that there are pestilential lagoons which are more pestilential than any similar territory to be found north. But I do not believe that, shunning local conditions which would be bad anywhere, and worse in the tropics, well-selected locations are unhealthy because of tropical heat and moisture, except in certain cases. On the other hand, I believe that almost all elderly people and a large number of overworked and tired-out persons would find that tropical life costs a largely diminished outlay of energy with a corresponding husbanding of nervous.and metabolic forces. In illustration of the foregoing statement I give the following facts:

The island of Dominica lies in fifteen degrees north latitude and contained twenty-nine thousand people in 1885. Dr. Nicholls, the chief medical officer of the island, whom I personally know, made a report to the managers of the Colonial Exhibition held in London in the year 1886, in which he stated that the death rate of the preceding year was fifteen and a half per thousand of the population—that is to say, the death rate in this small island, deep in the tropics, was less by ten per thousand than the average for New York city. The people are mostly blacks. Further inquiries revealed the fact that there were, at that time, three hundred and ninety-one white people—men, women, and children—and that there had been two deaths among them during the previous year: one from apoplexy and one, a nun, died from phthisis, which she had brought from England, she having come to the island in the hope of benefit to her health. In fact, there was not one death among the whites from any disease generally supposed to be especially tropical. The death rate is higher in some of the other islands, but not higher, according to the best information I could get, than in northern communities from the same classes of diseases. It should also be remembered that many of the West India Islands are in a deplorably bad sanitary condition, exposing them to be scourged from time to time by importations of yellow fever, smallpox, and such like epidemics, when, of course, the death rate is largely increased. The foregoing applies more especially to the Windward Islands, which possess some conspicuous