rm. Not tuberculosis alone, but small-pox, measles,
alcohol and a dozen other importations of the conquerors, found in the
aborigines of the New World a stock which had never been selected
against these diseases.

It is the custom of sentimentalists sometimes to talk as if the North
American Indian had been killed off by the white man. So he was,--but
not directly: he was killed off by natural selection, acting through the
white man's diseases and narcotics. In 1841 Catlin wrote, "Thirty
millions of white men are now scuffling for the goods and luxuries of
life over the bones of twelve millions of red men, six millions of whom
have fallen victims to small-pox." Small-pox is an old story to the
white race, and the death of the least resistant strains in each
generation has left a population that is fairly resistant. It was new to
the natives of America, and history shows the result. Alcohol, too,
counted its victims by the thousand, for the same reason. The process of
natural selection among the North American Indians has not yet stopped;
if there are a century from now any Indians left, they will of
necessity belong to stocks which are relatively resistant to alcohol and
tuberculosis and the other widespread and fatal diseases which were
unknown upon this continent before Columbus.

The decrease of natives following the Spanish conquest of tropical
America has long been one of the most striking events of history.
Popular historians sometimes speak as if most of the native population
had been killed off by the cruelty of the conquistadores. Surely such
talk could not proceed from those who are familiar with the action of
natural selection. It is obvious that when the Spaniard brought the
natives together, making them work in mines and assemble in churches, he
brought them under conditions especially favorable for infection by the
new diseases which he had brought. The aborigines of the New World, up
to the time the Spaniards came, had undergone no evolution whatever
against these diseases; consequently the evolution began at so rapid a
rate that in a few centuries only those who lived in out-of-the-way
places remain unscathed.

The same story is repeated, in a survey of the history of the Pacific
Islands. Even such a disease as whooping-cough carried off adults by the
hundred. Robert Louis Stevenson has left a graphic picture[63] of
natural selection at work:

"The tribe of Hapaa," he writes, "is said to have numbere