Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/873

Rh place. In other words, the peoples of the Mediterranean basin, learning of their aptitude for a southward migration, would perhaps move to Algeria, displacing the people of the Soudan and the Semitic stocks toward the equator. To fill the place thus left vacant, the people of northern France slowly drift to the Rhone Valley and Provence for a generation or two, and their place is taken by Germans and Belgians.

That this is a tendency at the present time can not be doubted. Each generation adapting itself quietly would produce succeeding ones with an inherited immunity. Unfortunately, this most reasonable let-alone policy has two fatal objections: in the first place, it requires a policy of noninterference; and, more potent still, it absolutely neglects the political factor. To suppose that France would quietly allow her people to be dispossessed by Germans, even though she aided her colonial policy thereby, or that Germany would quietly leave Africa to her Gallic neighbor, is not to be supposed for a moment. Nevertheless, it will be probably the only policy which will finally produce a new immune type in the regions of the equator. Of course, England is by fate condemned to follow the first policy we have outlined. France, indeed, is the only one of the European states which extends over the two contrasted European climates; a large measure of her success is probably due to that fact; while all the nations north of the Alps must traverse her territory or that of Italy on the way to these newly discovered lands. Great political results are therefore not impossible, if the prognosis we have indicated prove to be correct. At all events, enough has perhaps been said to show that great problems for science remain to be solved before the statesman can safely proceed to people those tropical regions of the earth so lately apportioned among European states.