Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/646

626 weaker and the colonists are better able to cope with them. In a peaceful state they resemble the Epizoa and may even, like that class of animal parasites, render accidental services by teaching the colonists certain kinds of cultivation, as the Indians taught the New-Englanders to grow maize and the Maoris taught the New-Zealanders to grow sweet potatoes.

Some of these colonial parasites, having received a start, become self-supporting by tilling the lands that have been graciously left them. These become almost alien elements in the young society, slightly connected with it through government superintendence or missionary labor, as the Maoris or Blackfellows, or altogether unconnected with it, as the Arabs and Kabyles of Algeria. Their nomadic and more dependent kinsmen are true commensals in that they live, as in Australia, on the offal of animals newly killed by settlers, some milk given them, and the use of their dogs for hunting; or, as in South America, they receive from the Government used-up horses for food. They render services in return. The South American rastreador, the black police of Queensland, and the hundreds of black trackers who have followed criminals into the bush with extraordinary skill and no little courage, are the human parallels of many species of birds.

We rise to mutualism when the lower races are employed as troops, and this has its degrees. They are used as combatants in their own ways, like the red Indians during the wars between the French and English in North America in the last century, the tame South American Indians in the war against the wild Indians in 1832, and the Hottentots in South Africa in 1859. There is more organization in the Houssas and other African troops now enlisted on the Gold Coast. The Bengal Lancers and the once dangerous Sikh infantry are the pride of British India; and the ferocious Apaches have lately been trained into obedient and disciplined soldiers. All colored peoples are employed as carriers, and many as guides, boatmen, divers, and what not. The reciprocity or the rivalry of play is perhaps higher than that of work or fighting. The Australian blacks have defeated a white team at cricket, and the Maori footballer ranks high in a footballing colony.

11. The immediate effect of the contact with white immigrants is invariably disastrous and in certain cases fatal to the indigenes. The law has been correctly stated by Mr. Benjamin Kidd. Wherever the climate is so temperate that white men can not only reside and work but also multiply, the native race in occupation must inevitably disappear. An addendum is, however, needed. The limit of such residence is no hard-and-fast line, but a vanishing point, which is being driven ever nearer the equator and nearer the poles. French