Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/737

Rh cereals or lighter food. The Chinese are especially favored in accommodation to a new tropical climate by reason of their simple diet of rice.

More important even than food, as a correction to be applied, is the effect of daily habits of life and of profession upon the physiological processes.

An indolent life always and everywhere tends to superinduce a multitude of disorders. De Quatrefages has pointed out that in the West Indies the wealthy and idle Creoles, and not the "petit blancs," swell the death-rate of the white population above the average. Gentle and regular exercise, then, must be accounted one of the most important hygienic precautions to be observed. Worse than lack of exercise, however, is overexertion, especially if it be coupled with exposure to the hot sun or to miasmatic exhalations. Statistics for the Jewish race, confining all its activities to shops in the towns, must be corrected, therefore, for this circumstance, before they are compared with statistics for the Germans, who as colonists take up the ever-deadly cultivation of the soil. The Boers, who thrive as herders, would undoubtedly suffer were they to stir up the soil as husbandmen. Most favored of all is that nationality which is seafaring by nature. The apparently high vitality of the Italians and Maltese in Algeria is in part because they are mainly sailors and fishermen. In consonance with this principle is the relative immunity, already cited, of the wives and children of soldiers in India. Slavery also always produces a terrific death-rate which vitiates all comparison between the statistics for the white and the negro. It should be noted, moreover, that such an institution exercises a selective choice upon the negro; for the survivors of such severe treatment will generally be a picked lot, which ought to exhibit vitality to a marked degree, all the weaklings having been removed. Racial comparisons are also invalidated by the fact that hygiene and sanitation are generally confined to the European populations, so that, other things being equal, a higher death-rate among the natives would be most natural.

In any scientific discussion of the effect of climate upon the human body the racial element must always be considered; and