Melville Estimated The
Population At Two Thousand, Not Taking Into Consideration The Small
Adjoining Valley Of Ho-O-U-Mi.
Life has rotted away in this
wonderful garden spot, where the climate is as delightful and
healthful as any to be found in the world.
Not alone were the
Typeans physically magnificent; they were pure. Their air did not
contain the bacilli and germs and microbes of disease that fill our
own air. And when the white men imported in their ships these
various micro-organisms or disease, the Typeans crumpled up and went
down before them.
When one considers the situation, one is almost driven to the
conclusion that the white race flourishes on impurity and
corruption. Natural selection, however, gives the explanation. We
of the white race are the survivors and the descendants of the
thousands of generations of survivors in the war with the micro-
organisms. Whenever one of us was born with a constitution
peculiarly receptive to these minute enemies, such a one promptly
died. Only those of us survived who could withstand them. We who
are alive are the immune, the fit - the ones best constituted to live
in a world of hostile micro-organisms. The poor Marquesans had
undergone no such selection. They were not immune. And they, who
had made a custom of eating their enemies, were now eaten by enemies
so microscopic as to be invisible, and against whom no war of dart
and javelin was possible. On the other hand, had there been a few
hundred thousand Marquesans to begin with, there might have been
sufficient survivors to lay the foundation for a new race - a
regenerated race, if a plunge into a festering bath of organic
poison can be called regeneration.
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