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which their civilization rested will flourish as well as in their own home.1

We may note also that the climate of North America brought : Europeans in contact with no new diseases. North of the Gulf of Mexico the maladies of man were not increased by the transportation from Europe. It is difficult to arrive at a satisfactory determination concerning the effect of American conditions. upon the peoples who have come from Europe to live a life of many generations upon its soil. Much has been said in a desultory way upon this subject, but little that has any very clear scientific value. The problem is a very complicated one. In the first place, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to separate the effects of climate from those brought about by a diversity of the social conditions, such as habits of labor, of food, etc. Moreover, the problem is further complicated by the fact that there has been a constant influx of folk into America from various parts of Europe, so that in most parts of the country there has been a constant admixture of the old blood and the new.

After reviewing the sources of information, I am convinced that the following facts may be regarded as established: the American people are no smaller in size than are the peoples in Europe from which they are derived; they are at least as long-lived; their capacity to withstand wounds, fatigue, etc., is at least as great as that of any European people; the average of physical beauty is probably quite as good as it is among an equal population in the Old World; the fecundity of the people

1 It is an interesting fact that while America has given but one domesticated animal to Europe, in the turkey, it has furnished a number of the most important vegetables, among them maize, tobacco, and the potato. The absence of strong domesticable animals in America doubtless affected the development of civilization among its indigenous people. The buffalo is apparently not domesticable. The horse, which seems to have been developed on North American soil, and to have spread thence to Europe and Asia, seems to have disappeared in America before the coming of man to its shores. The only beast which could profitably be subjugated was the weak vicuna, which could only be used for carrying light burdens. But for the help given them by the sheep, the bull, and the horse, we may well doubt if the Old-World races would have won their way much more effectively than those of America had done.

is not diminished. The compass of this essay will not permit me to enter into the details necessary to defend these propositions as they might be defended. I will, however, show certain facts which seem to support them. First, as regards the physical proportions of the American people. By far the largest collections of accurate measurements that have ever been made of men were made by the officers of the United States Sanitary Commission during the late Civil War. These statistics have been carefully tabulated by Dr. B. A. Gould, the distinguished astronomer. From the results reached by him it is plain that the average dimensions of these troops were as good as those of any European army; while the men from those states where the population had been longest separated from the mother country were, on the whole, the best formed of all.

The statistics of the life-insurance companies make it clear that the death rate is not higher in America among the classes that insure than in England. I am credibly informed that American companies expect a longer life among their clients than the English tables of mortality assume.

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The endurance of fatigue and wounds in armies has been proved by our Civil War to be as good as that of the best English or Continental troops. Such forced marches as that of Buell to the relief of the overwhelmed troops at Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh, where the men marched thirty-five miles without rest, and at once entered upon a contest which checked a victorious army, is proof enough of the physical and moral endurance of the people. The extraordinary percentage of seriously wounded men that recovered during the war, a proportion without parallel in European armies, — can only be attributed to the innate vigor of the men, and not to any superiority in the treatment they received. The distinguished physiologist, Dr. Brown-Sequard, assures me that the American body, be it that of man or beast, is more enduring of wounds than the European; that to make a given impression upon the body of a creature in America it is necessary to inflict severer wounds than it would be to produce the same effect on a creature of the same species in Europe. His opportunities for

forming an opinion on this subject have been singularly great, so that the assertion seems to me very important. That the fecundity of the population is not, on the whole, diminishing, is sufficiently shown by the statistics of the country. In the matter of physical beauty, the condition of the American people cannot, of course, be made a matter of statistics. The testimony of all intelligent travelers is to the effect that the forms of the people have lost nothing of their distinguished inheritance of beauty from their ancestors. The face is certainly no less intellectual in its type than that of the Teutonic peoples of the Old World, while the body is, though perhaps of a less massive mold, without evident marks of less symmetry.

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I next propose to consider the especial physical features of the continent in reference to the several settlements that were made upon it, the extent to which the geography and the local conditions of soil, climate, etc., have affected the fate of the several colonies planted on the eastern shore of North America north of Mexico.

Chance rather than choice determined the position of the several colonies that were planted on the American soil. So little was known of the natural conditions of the continent, or even of its shore geography, and the little that had been discovered was so unknown to navigators in general, that it was not possible to exercise much discretion in the placing of the first settlers in the New World. It happened that in this lottery the central parts of the American continent fell to the English people; while the French, by one chance and another, came into possession of two parts of the coast separated by over two thousand miles of shore. It will be plain from the map that these two positions were essentially the keys to the continent. The access to the interior of the continent by natural waterways is by two lines, on the north by the St. Lawrence system of lakes and rivers; on the south by the Mississippi system of rivers, which practically connects with the St. Lawrence system. Fortune, in giving France the control of these two great avenues, offered her the mastery of the whole of its

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vast domain. We have only to consider the part that the pathway of the Rhine played in the history of medieval trade in Europe, to understand how valuable these lines would have been until railways and canals had come to compete with waterways.

Throughout their efforts in North America the French showed a capacity for understanding the large questions of political geography, a genius for exploration, and a talent for making use of its results, or guiding their way to dominion, that is in singular contrast with the blundering processes of their English rivals. They seem to have understood the possibilities of the Mississippi valley a century and a half before the English began to understand them. They planted a system of posts and laid out lines for commerce through this region; they strove to organize the natives into civilized communities; they did all that the conditions permitted to achieve success. Their failure must be attributed to the want of colonists, to the essential irreclaimableness of the American savage, and to the want of a basis for an extended commerce in this country. There were no precious metals to tempt men into this wilderness, and none of the fancy for life or for lands among the home people, that wandering instinct which has been the basis of all the imperial power of the English race. Thus a most cleverly devised scheme of continental occupation, which was admirably well adapted to the physical conditions of the country, never came near to success. It fell beneath the clumsy power of another race that had the capacity for fixing itself firmly in new lands, and that grew without distinct plan until it came to possess them altogether.

The British settlements on the American coast were not very well placed for other than the immediate needs that led to their planting. They did not hold any one of the three waterways which led from the coast into the interior of the continent, as we have seen the French obtained the control of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, and, as is well known, the Dutch possession of the Hudson, which constituted the

third and least complete of the waterways into the interior of the continent.

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As regards their physical conditions, the original English colonies are divisible into three groups, those of New England; those of the Chesapeake and Delaware district, including Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and the central part of North Carolina; and those on the coast region of the Carolinas. Each of these regions has its proper physical characters, which have had special effects upon their early history. In New England we have a shore line that affords an excellent system of harbors for craft of all sizes, and a sea that abounds in fish. The land has a rugged surface made up of old mountain folds, which have been worn down to their roots by the sea and by the glaciers of many ice periods. There are no extended plains, and where small patches of level land occur, as along the sea, there they are mostly of a rather barren and sandy character. The remainder of the surface is very irregular, and nearly one half of it is either too steep for tillage or consists of exposed rocks. The soil is generally of clay, and was originally covered almost everywhere with closely sown bowlders that had to be removed before the plow could do its work. The rivers are mostly small, and from their numerous rapids not navigable to any great distance from the sea, and none of their valleys afford natural ways into the interior of the continent. In general structure this region is an isolated mass separated from the body of the continent by the high ridges of the Green mountains and the Berkshire hills, as well as by the deep. valley in which lie the Hudson and Lake Champlain. The climate is rigorous, only less so than that of Canada. There are not more than seven months for agricultural labor.

The New England district, including therein what we may term the Acadian peninsula of North America, or all east of Lake Champlain and the Hudson and south of the St. Lawrence, is more like northern Europe than any other part of America. Nature does not give with free hands in this region, yet it offered some advantages to the early settlers. The general stubbornness of the soil made the coast Indians few in number,

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