Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/313

Rh they had in themselves no principle of expansion. The mining settlement is a mechanical formation and not an organic growth. Its rise has been too often observed to need description. A lucky prospector finds a gold-or silver-bearing reef, possibly in a district indicated by a geologist, who is thus also a pioneer. The news spreads like the cry of fire. From the adjacent colonies and distant countries a mob of adventurers and old gold diggers crowd in and clamor for concessions. The field is soon white with tents, huts spring up as by magic, a "store" is set up, a hotel follows or precedes, and in a few weeks a wild-cat township comes into existence. It grows with the growth of the "diggings," and declines with them. When they are exhausted, the fortuitous concourse of its inhabitants scatter as swiftly as they came, and the township leads a death-in life existence on the tailings; or, if the country is favorable, the solider portion of the miners take to agriculture or industry, and the town becomes a manufacturing or distributing center. Denver, Ballarat, and Johannisburg are types of the miner's camp turned into flourishing cities. South America was founded as a series of gold and silver colonies, and saltpeter has lately established an English colony in Bolivia. The gold discoveries of 1851 "precipitated Australia into a nation." In still more recent days silver has generated several of the Western States and built up a great political party. Within the last decade gold has transformed a scattered population of farmers and big-game hunters in South Africa into a warlike republic. The j)recious metals thus start colonies, or give them an impulse when founded. They may even change their base. A pastoral and agricultural country, like Victoria, may be converted into a commercial and industrial country. Other results are more questionable. Population is attracted, but it is disorderly and without cohesion, and state industries have to be created for the support of the multitudes whom the exhaustion of the mines has thrown out of employment. Hence arise huge loans and oppressive debts, protective duties, overgrown cities and plethoric communities, where the brain is overfed and the extremities are starved.

These are, roughly outlined, the pioneer types of settlement that constitute the first chapter in the history of all colonies and countries. They have been assimilated to the asexual method of reproduction because they belong to a low grade of organization. They are initiated mainly by men; they do not, taken singly or all together, form a perfect social organism or a self-subsisting society; and they are incapable of a prolonged existence.

Asexual passes into sexual reproduction by a series of gradual transitions that are no longer a mystery; they have been well