Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/314

by excessive privations, and their powers of resistance were thereby broken down. Forty per cent, of the Garde Mobile, and of the troops returned from Italy, who took the disease, died, but I am not aware that any European army, in however evil case, ever lost through measles one-fifth of its total strength, as did in South America the "National Army," among the ranks of which there were presumably many individuals of Indian or mixed blood. No records exist showing that Old World communities, however unfavourably circumstanced or however savage, have ever suffered like "the natives on the banks of the Amazon, where the number of those that died of the sickness was reckoned at 30,000, whole tribes having been cut off; also in Astoria in 1829, where nearly half of the natives fell victims to the disease." Nothing of the kind has been known to happen in Africa, for example, in the latitude of the Amazon, in countries where the natives are fully as savage as the South American Indians. In the examples quoted, Hirsch mentions only two instances in which Old World races have suffered very severely, i.e. in South Africa, the very extremity of the Old World, and in Mauritius, an outlying island; and the mere fact that measles proved so death-dealing on a sudden in those lands, proves that the races inhabiting them must have been but little afflicted by the disease, since comparatively so few individuals can have acquired immunity through infection and recovery in childhood, as so many of us in Europe do. As regards the epidemic in Fiji, we may be permitted to doubt that in such a latitude such a savage race dwells in "huts without ventilation." Moreover, the Fijians, as well as the other savage races mentioned, were attacked by the disease when in normal health, and in an environment to which Natural Selection had adapted them. The survival of the fittest had inured them to their swamps and streams