7. A large amount of animal food, instead of giving strength, heats the blood, renders the system feverish, and consequently weakens the whole body.
8. Bread is one of the best articles of diet. Rice and split vetches are wholesome and nutritious. Vegetables are essential to good health, as carrots, turnips, onions, native greens, etc.
9. Fruit, when sound and ripe, is beneficial rather than hurtful.
10. The same amount of stimulant undiluted, is much more injurious than when mixed with water.
11. With ordinary precaution and attention to the common laws of hygiene, Europeans may live as long in the tropics as anywhere else.
Stanley’s final observation on the existence of the white race in Africa does not smack of the confidence he has thus far striven to inspire. Yet it does not suggest an impossibility, nor anything difficult to carry out, since the continent is so contiguous to Europe.
He recommends a change of scene to the African denizen for at least three months in a year, because the constant high temperature assisted by the monotony and poverty of diet, is enervating and depressing. The physical system becomes debilitated by the heat, necessitating after a few years such recuperation as can be found only in temperate latitudes. Even with persons who retain health, this enervating feeling begins to dawn at the end of eighteen mouths; hence traders, missionaries, planters and agriculturists, who hope to keep up buoyancy of spirit and such a condition of body as will resist the climate through a lifetime, should seek the periodical relaxation to be found in trips to higher latitudes.
While this may not be giving his whole case away, or indeed suggesting nothing more than such change of scene as our own physicians recommend to overtaxed business men, it, nevertheless, brings up the ultimate question of natural and permanent fitness. Suppose that all fear of African climate is eliminated from the mind of the white man. Suppose it is settled that he can survive there to a good old age, by using the precautions herein laid down. Will any traveler, climatologist or ethnologist arise and tell us that the white man can escape physical degeneracy in the tropics? As his African offspring come and go for a few generations, will there not be a gradual loss of the hardihood which temperate climates encourage, and a gradual growth of that languor and effeminacy which equatorial climates engender? The presence of the white races in Africa can neither reverse the laws of their existence and growth, nor the laws which God has given to a tropical realm. Living nature, including man, is simply obedience to an environment. We agree to this in the vegetable world. The oak of our forest is the puny lichen of the arctic regions. The palm of the tropics withers before northern frost. Reverse the order, and the lichen dries up beneath a tropical sun. The oak finds nothing congenial in African soil. As to the lower animals, it is the same. Stanley found both mule and donkey power ineffective on the Congo. Livingstone’s mules were bitten by the tsetse fly on Nyassa and died a miserable death from ulcers. The horse dwindles away within the tropics. The camel fared no better than the mule with Livingstone, though the Arab may be said to have conquered the Great Sahara with it, and
Col. Baker used it to overcome Nile distances which defied his boats. Even the native and trained buffalo was a failure with Livingstone when he attempted to make it a beast of burden through Nyassaland and into the Upper Congo section, notwithstanding the fact that it had been invaluable to him below the tropics, and in the form of the native ox is in daily use as a beast of burden and travel in the Kalihari regions. So take the elephant, lion, leopard, hippopotamus, alligator, soko, monkey, the birds, the fishes, and transport them north; how quickly they cease to propagate, and in the end perish! Thus far living nature seems to obey the immutable law of environment. It is equally so with the higher animal life which we find in man. The negroes, who were torn from their native soil by the cruel hand of slavery, could not be transplanted with success in latitudes remote from the tropics. It cannot yet be proved that the white races will deteriorate and grow effeminate in tropical Africa, but as to other tropical countries it is established that white energy is gradually lost in effeminacy wherever it persists in the unnatural attempt to face the eternal blaze of the equatorial sun.
