CHAPTER XIX.
INFLUENCE OF CONDITIONS OF LIFE AND RACE.

I. The human species, springing originally from a single centre of appearance, is now universally distributed. In their innumerable travels, its representatives have encountered the widest difference of climate and the most opposite conditions of life, and now inhabit both the polar and equatorial regions. It must, therefore, have possessed the necessary aptitudes for accommodating itself to all the natural conditions of existence; in other words, it must have had the power of becoming acclimatised and naturalised in every place where we meet with it.

The possibility of man living and prospering in other regions than those in which his fathers lived, has been denied in a more or less emphatic manner by the greater number of polygenists. Without going as far as this, certain monogenists have held that a human race, when constituted for given conditions of life, was, so to speak, a prisoner to them, and could not effect a change without losing his life. Other writers have maintained precisely opposite opinions, and have held that any human group could at once become acclimatised in any given spot.

There are exaggerations and errors in all these extreme doctrines.

II. In spite of the assertions of Knox, Frenchmen can live perfectly well in Corsica, provided only, that they avoid the marshes of the eastern coast, which the islanders themselves cannot inhabit. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the fugitives from Provence and Languedoc founded villages in the valley of the Danube, thus contradicting beforehand one of the assertions of the English doctor. English and French emigrants to the United States, and to Canada, have not degenerated, in spite of the assertions of the same author. Though modified, often in a very striking manner, as we shall presently see, the Yankee squatters and the Canadian backwoodsmen are certainly not inferior to the first colonists who planted the European standard in the midst of the Red-Skins.

Knox, and the anthropologists who agree either entirely or partially with him, attribute to emigration alone the maintenance and growth of the white population in America and elsewhere. In their opinion the European emigrant loses, after several generations, the power of reproduction. If the human current, which sets from Europe towards the Colonies were to be stopped, they maintain that the population would rapidly diminish, and the local races regain the ascendancy, that the United States would return to the Red-Skins, and Mexico to the descendants of Montezuma.

This assertion will easily be answered by a few statistics. They are taken from the history of French races, which, since the treaty of Paris in 1763, have, although in a slight degree, directly contributed to the peopling of Canada. There were in this country:

In 1814275,000inhabitants of French origin.
In 1851695,945””
In 18611,037,770””