these races are in no way inferior to Europeans, as regards duration of life.

Is it different in the case of the Negro, as Virey has thought? Everything seems to prove the contrary. Even when removed from his native land, and placed under conditions which we have seen to be very unfavourable to him, the Negro lives as long as the European. This result is obtained from the register of slaves consulted by Prichard in the West Indies. This anthropologist has shown, by examples drawn from different sources, that centenarians were far from rare among the individuals of this race scattered through different parts of America. From the documents which he quotes, it even appears that in the States of New Jersey, an official census gave a little more than one Negro centenarian in the thousand, but only one White centenarian in one hundred and fifty thousand.

Nevertheless Adanson, Winterbottom, and others, state that the Negro of the Senegal and Guinea age early in life, and the latter adds that individuals of this race rarely reach an advanced age. Dr. Oldfield, in the great English Expedition up the Niger, makes the same remark with reference to the part of the country which skirts the river Nunn, a marshy region, covered with a luxuriant vegetation supported by inundations. But higher up the river, in the country discovered by Nyffé, he met, on the contrary, with a large number of old men who must have been upwards of eighty, and visited an old chief, who, he says, was 115 years old.

There is nothing contradictory in these facts. They merely show us that the Negro is subject to the law common to all other men. It is in vain that he has conformed to conditions of existence, which the White has so much difficulty in living under; when these conditions are aggravated and exceed a certain limit, he suffers, and his life is shortened. The native of the banks of the Nunn is placed, as a Negro, under conditions of existence similar to those to which, in former times, the Whites of the Dombe in France were subject, and in both cases the result was the same.

But beyond these exceptional localities, when the conditions are equally favourable, the duration of life seems to be the same in the two typical races which are the most widely separated of all in the human species. In any case the same extreme limits have been proved for the Negro and the White.

CHAPTER XXXII.

PATHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS.

I. THE pathological, as well as the physiological, condition in the various human groups presents peculiarities which may be considered as characters. These characters are sometimes even more clearly defined, because morbid phenomena are often very strongly marked. This question is one of great interest; but to treat it in the detail which it deserves, would require a greater amount of both time and space than can be given it here. I shall, therefore, confine myself to recalling a few general facts already known, and to quoting a few examples which will serve to fix the nature and meaning of pathological facts regarded from an anthropological point of view.

II. We have, as yet, in treating of the conditions of life, scarcely considered more than their modifying action, while it is universally known that they also exert a disturbing action. Actions of this kind are in most cases the fundamental cause of disease.

We are here, therefore, again led to considerations similar to those with which we have so often been brought in contact. We will therefore recall in a few words the general results of the preceding investigations.

1. The fundamental nature of all men is the same.

2. The formation of distinct races has been the sole cause of modifications in this fundamental nature of all human groups.

3. The several characters and special aptitudes which constitute a kind of acquired nature, have, in each of the

groups, been developed under the influence of the conditions of life.

It is clear that when the disturbing action, the cause of disease, works upon the fundamental element, the same causes will produce fundamentally similar effects; when, on the contrary, this action is exercised upon the acquired and special element of each race, the same causes will produce different effects. In other words, unity of species and multiplicity of races involve the liability of all men to common diseases, which will, at most, vary as to accessory phenomena; but also allow the existence of diseases more or less peculiar to certain human groups.

Nevertheless, the great majority of diseases will be common to all men, and merely present modifications in the different groups. For example, one race may be either more liable to or more unsusceptible to certain affections than another.

Let me observe in passing, and without insisting upon facts known to all agriculturists and to all breeders, that similar phenomena are presented by the races of vegetable species which have long been under cultivation, and of animal species for centuries subject to domestication.

The propositions which I have just brought forward are the natural result of the facts to which I have already drawn attention, and of the principles admitted at the commencement of this book. They are in remarkable accordance with the results of experiment and observation.

III. It becomes more and more evident, from investigations which are daily increasing in number, that all human races are subject to almost every disease.

The Negro and the White have often been contrasted from a pathological point of view, and it has been stated that localities in which the latter succumb, are not unhealthy to the former. It is said that marsh fevers, dysentery, and abscess upon the liver, so feared by Europeans, do not attack the inhabitants of the coasts of Guinea, and the banks of the Senegal and the Gaboon. These are exaggerated statements which were reduced to their true value by the observations

of Winterbottom, Oldfield, and others. More recent works confirm these earlier observations in every respect: "The Negro race," says M. Berchon, "suffers from dysentery and abscess on the liver like the white race. 1. The deadly fevers, which, with the two diseases just mentioned, form the pathognomonical trilogy of Senegalese pathology, will first attack Europeans; but the Blacks are by no means exempt from them."

The last remark is confirmed in a very remarkable manner by the numbers given in the accompanying table, which I borrow from M. Boudin. He gives a summary of the English official documents upon the annual mortality in the thousand at Sierra Leone from 1829 to 1836.

Sierra Leone is one of the most unhealthy stations for the White race, while for the Negro it is, on the contrary, one of the places where the rate of mortality is lowest. The relation which shows this difference is indeed most alarming (483.0 to 30:1). Yet the nosological table is the same for the two races, for although in this statement there are no eruptive fevers given for the English soldiers, we know very well that the White races are by no means exempt from them.

Other tables drawn up by M. Boudin, with the assistance of the same documents, bring into still stronger relief the fundamental fact now under consideration. In one of them we learn the comparative mortality of the Negro and the Black from marsh fevers in seventeen localities, taken from nearly all parts of the globe, from Gibraltar to Guiana, and from Jamaica to Ceylon. The number of deaths is always considerably greater for the Europeans, but they almost