Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/869

Rh Moreover, the French nation is further divided against itself. That the Provençals—the offshoots of the Mediterranean branch of the Aryan stock—succeed better than the people of the Paris basin in the tropics is generally conceded; and the bulk of French emigration to-day comes from the Rhone Valley, Corsica, and Provence. This makes the fact still more curious that these same Provençals endured the hardships of Napoleon's Moscow campaign far better than their comrades from Normandy and Champagne. Can it, indeed, be due to an admixture of Semitic blood, as Wallace suggests?

This disability of the Anglo-Saxon stock does not seem to indicate any less vitality, but rather the reverse. The Crimean War apparently showed that the English possessed a peculiar advantage over the French in their ability to recover speedily from severe wounds. In fact, the mortality after capital operations in English hospitals is only about half that among the French. We have already observed that primitive peoples, while showing a relative immunity from septic disorders, still remain peculiarly sensitive to all changes of climate. And the case of the Anglo-Saxon stock is analogous to it in this respect, having a higher recuperative power conjoined to disability in becoming acclimatized. This is undoubtedly in part due to national habits, but it also appears to be rooted in race. In peopling the new lands of the earth, therefore, we observe a curious complication; for it is precisely those people who need the colonies most, and who are bending all their political energies to that end, who labor under the severest disabilities. A popular opinion is abroad that Africa is to be dominated by the English and German nations. If there be any virtue in prediction, it would rather appear that their activities will be less successful as soon as the pioneering stage