This entirely materialistic conception of happiness which, it is certain, the Puerto Rican peasant still entertains, is now giving way slowly but surely before the new influences that are being brought to bear on himself and on his surroundings. The touch of education is dispelling the darkness of ignorance that enveloped the rural districts of this island until lately; industrial activity is placing the means of greater comfort within the reach of every one who cares to work for them; the observance of the laws of health is beginning to be enforced, even in the bohío, and with them will come a greater morality. In a word, in ten years the Puerto Rican jíbaro will have disappeared, and in his place there will be an industrious, well-behaved, and no longer illiterate class of field laborers, with a nobler conception of happiness than that to which they have aspired for many generations. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 61: Estudio sobre el paludismo en Puerto Rico.] [Footnote 62: El campesino Puertoriqueño, sus condiciones, etc. Revista Puertoriqueña, vols. ii, iii, 1887, 1888.] [Footnote 63: An Account of the Present State of the Island of Puerto Rico. London, 1834.] CHAPTER XXX ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE MODERN INHABITANTS OF PUERTO RICO During the initial period of conquest and colonization, no Spanish females came to this or any other of the conquered territories. Soldiers, mariners, monks, and adventurers brought no families with them; so that by the side of the aboriginals and the Spaniards "pur sang" there sprang up an indigenous population of mestizos. The result of the union of two physically, ethically, and intellectually widely differing races is _not_ the transmission to the progeny of any or all of the superior qualities of the progenitor, but rather his own moral degradation. The mestizos of Spanish America, the Eurasians of the East Indies, the mulattoes of Africa are moral, as well as physical hybrids in whose character, as a rule, the worst qualities of the two races from which they spring predominate. It is only in subsequent generations, after oft-repeated crossings and recrossings, that atavism takes place, or that the fusion of the two races is finally consummated through the preponderance of the physiological attributes of the ancestor of superior race. The early introduction of negro slaves, almost exclusively males, the affinity between them and the Indians, the state of common servitude and close, daily contact produced another race. By the side of the mestizo there grew up the zambo. Later, when negro women were brought from Santo Domingo or other islands, the mulatto was added. Considering the class to which the majority of the first Spanish settlers in this island belonged, the social status resulting from these additions to their number could be but little superior to that of the aboriginals themselves.