Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/738

666 correction must be made for ethnic peculiarities before any definite conclusions become possible.

Three diseases are peculiar to the white race and to civilization—namely, consumption, syphilis, and alcoholism, there being marked differences in the predisposition of each of the barbarous races for them, which often vary inversely with the degree of civilization they have attained; so that their widely varying liability to contract these diseases becomes an important consideration in the ingrafting of any degree of culture or of artificial life upon the native inhabitants of a colonial possession.

The Aryan race in its liability to consumption stands midway between the Mongol and the negro, climatic conditions being equal. The immunity of the Ural-Altaic stock in this respect is very remarkable. The Kirghis of the steppes, exposed to the severest climatic changes, are rarely affected with it, and the pure Turanian stock is almost exempt from its ravages. This may be one reason why the Chinese are able to colonize in many places even in the tropics where the negro can not live, since it is well known that a tropical climate is fatal to all persons with a consumptive tendency. The Chinese succeed in Guiana, where the white can not live; and they thrive from Mamiatchin, where the mean temperature is below freezing, to Singapore on the equator. That their immunity from phthisis is due in large measure to race, and not to climatic circumstances, seems to be indicated by the results of ethnic intermixture. The Japanese apparently derive a liability to it from their Malay blood, which not even their Turanian descent can counteract. The Malays, a mixed race, seem to lack vitality in many other respects as well, in all