Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

But the next takes us forwards. Great experiments in the transfer of populations from one climate to another have gone on ever since the discovery of America, and are going on now; sometimes westwards as to the New World; sometimes eastwards as to Australia and New Zealand; now from Celtic populations like Ireland; now from Gothic countries like England and Germany; now from Spain and Portugal;—to say nothing of the equally great phænomenon of Negro slavery being the real or supposed condition of American prosperity. Will this succeed? Ask this at Philadelphia, or Lima, Sydney, or Auckland, and the answer is pretty sure to be in the affirmative. Ask it of one of our English anatomists. His answer is as follows:—“Let us attend now to the greatest of all experiments ever made in respect of the transfer of a population indigenous to one continent, and attempting by emigration to take possession of another; to cultivate it with their own hands; to colonize it; to persuade the world, in time, that they are the natives of the newly occupied land. Northern America and Australia furnished the fields of this, the greatest of experiments. Already has the horse, the sheep, the ox, become as it were indigenous to these lands. Nature did not place them there at first, yet they seem to thrive and flourish, and multiply exceedingly. Yet, even as regards these domestic animals, we cannot be quite certain. Will they eventually be self-supporting? Will they supplant the llama, the kangaroo, the buffalo, the deer? or in order to effect this, will they require to be constantly renovated from Europe? If this be the contingency, then the acclimatation is not perfect. How is it with man himself? The man planted there by nature, the Red-Indian, differs from all others on the face of the earth; he gives way before the European races, the Saxon and the Celtic; the Celt, Iberian, and the Lusitanian in the south; the Celt and the Saxon in the north.

“Of the tropical regions of the New World, I need not speak; every one knows that none but those whom nature placed there can live there; that no Europeans can colonize a tropical country. But may there not be some doubts of their self-support in milder regions? Take the Northern States themselves. There the Saxon and the Celt seem to thrive beyond all that is recorded in history. But are we quite sure that this is fated to be permanent? Annually from Europe is poured a hundred thousand men and women of the best blood of the Scandinavian, and twice the number of the pure Celt; and so long as this continues, he is sure to thrive. But check it, arrest it suddenly, as in the case of Mexico and Peru; throw the onus of reproduction upon the population, no longer European, but a struggle between the European alien and his adopted father-land. The climate; the forests; the remains of the aborigines not yet extinct; last, not least, that unknown and mysterious degradation of life and energy, which in ancient times seems to have decided the fate of all the Phœnician, Grecian, and Coptic colonies. Cut off from their original stock, they gradually withered and faded, and finally died away. The Phœnician never became acclimatized in Africa, nor in Cornwall, nor in Wales; vestiges of his race, it is true, still remain, but they are mere vestiges. Peru and Mexico are fast retrograding to their primitive condition; may not the Northern States, under similar circumstances, do the same?

“Already the United States man differs in appearance from the European: the ladies early lose their teeth; in both sexes the adipose cellular cushion interposed between the skin and the aponeuroses and muscles disappears, or, at least, loses its adipose portion; the muscles become stringy, and show themselves; the tendons appear on the surface; symptoms of premature decay manifest themselves. Now what do these signs, added to the uncertainty of infant life in the Southern States, and the smallness of their families in the Northern, indicate? Not the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon into the Red-Indian, but warnings that the climate has not been made for him, nor he for the climate.

“See what even a small amount of insulation has done for the French Celt in Lower Canada. Look at the race there! Small men, small horses, small cattle, still smaller carts, ideas smallest of all; he is not even the Celt of modern France! He is the French Celt of the Regency, the thing of Louis XIII. Stationary—absolutely stationary—his numbers, I believe, depend on the occasional admixture of fresh blood from Europe. He has increased to a million since his first settlement in Canada; but much of this has come from Britain, and not from France. Give us the statistics of the original families who keep themselves apart from the fresh blood imported into the province. Let us have the real and solid increase of the original habitans, as they are pleased to call themselves, and then we may calculate on the result.

“Had the colony been left to itself, cut off from Europe, for a century or two, it is my belief that the forest and the buffalo, and the Red-Indian, would have pushed him into the St. Lawrence[5].”

I give no opinion as to the truth of the extract; remarking that, whether right or wrong, it is forcibly and confidently expressed. All that the passage has to do is to illustrate the character of the question. It directs our consideration to what will be.

To work out questions in either of these classes, there must, of course, be some reference to the general operations of climate, food, and other influences;—operations which imply a correlative susceptibility of modification on the part of the human organism.

In a well-constructed machine, the different parts have a definite relation to each. The greater the resistance, the thicker the ropes and chains; and the thicker the ropes and chains, the stronger the pulleys; the stronger the pulleys, the greater the force; and so on throughout. Delicate pulleys with heavy ropes, or light lines with bulky pulleys, would be so much power wasted. The same applies to the skeleton. If the muscle be massive, the bone to which it is attached must be firm; otherwise there is a disproportion of parts. In this respect the organized and animated body agrees with a common machine, the work of human hands. It agrees with, but it also surpasses it. It has an internal power of self-adjustment. No amount of work would convert a thin line into a strong rope, or a light framework into a strong one. If bulk be wanted, it must be given in the first instance. But what is it with the skeleton, the framework to the muscles? It has the power of adapting itself to the stress laid upon it. The food that we live upon is of different degrees of hardness and toughness; and the harder and tougher it is, the more work is there for the muscles of the lower jaw. But, as these work, they grow; for—other things being equal—size is power; and as they grow, other parts must grow also. There are the bones. How they grow is a complex question. Sometimes a smooth surface becomes rough, a fine bone coarse; sometimes a short process becomes lengthened, or a narrow one broadens; sometimes the increase is simple or absolute, and the bone in question changes its character without affecting that of the parts in contact with it. But frequently there is a complication of changes, and the development of one bone takes place at the expense of another; the relations of the different portions of parts of a skeleton being thus altered.