Upon the evidence of travellers of the highest reputation, it seems that the greater number of American peoples also reach an advanced age, and often without bearing any external traces of decrepitude. However rude and often precarious their mode of life may be, the representatives of these races are in no way inferior to Europeans, as regards duration of life.
Is it different in the case of the Negro, as Virey has thought? Everything seems to prove the contrary. Even when removed from his native land, and placed under conditions which we have seen to be very unfavourable to him, the Negro lives as long as the European. This result is obtained from the register of slaves consulted by Prichard in the West Indies. This anthropologist has shown, by examples drawn from different sources, that centenarians were far from rare among the individuals of this race scattered through different parts of America. From the documents which he quotes, it even appears that in the States of New Jersey, an official census gave a little more than one Negro centenarian in the thousand, but only one White centenarian in one hundred and fifty thousand.
Nevertheless Adanson, Winterbottom, and others, state that the Negro of the Senegal and Guinea age early in life, and the latter adds that individuals of this race rarely reach an advanced age. Dr. Oldfield, in the great English Expedition up the Niger, makes the same remark with reference to the part of the country which skirts the river Nunn, a marshy region, covered with a luxuriant vegetation supported by inundations. But higher up the river, in the country discovered by Nyffé, he met, on the contrary, with a large number of old men who must have been upwards of eighty, and visited an old chief, who, he says, was 115 years old.
There is nothing contradictory in these facts. They merely show us that the Negro is subject to the law common to all other men. It is in vain that he has conformed to conditions of existence, which the White has so much difficulty in living under; when these conditions are aggravated and exceed a certain limit, he suffers, and his life is shortened. The native of the banks of the Nunn is placed, as a Negro, under conditions of existence similar to those to which, in former times, the Whites of the Dombe in France were subject, and in both cases the result was the same.
But beyond these exceptional localities, when the conditions are equally favourable, the duration of life seems to be the same in the two typical races which are the most widely separated of all in the human species. In any case the same extreme limits have been proved for the Negro and the White.
CHAPTER XXXII.
PATHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS.
I. The pathological, as well as the physiological, condition in the various human groups presents peculiarities which may be considered as characters. These characters are sometimes even more clearly defined, because morbid phenomena are often very strongly marked. This question is one of great interest; but to treat it in the detail which it deserves, would require a greater amount of both time and space than can be given it here. I shall, therefore, confine myself to recalling a few general facts already known, and to quoting a few examples which will serve to fix the nature and meaning of pathological facts regarded from an anthropological point of view.
II. We have, as yet, in treating of the conditions of life, scarcely considered more than their modifying action, while it is universally known that they also exert a disturbing action. Actions of this kind are in most cases the fundamental cause of disease.