VI. The French Antilles, as also the greater number of the sister islands, are the scene of valuable experiments upon the aptitude of different human races to stand this exceptional climate, which is one of the most difficult to overcome. The Negro was carried there by force very shortly after the occupation of the islands by the Whites, and has lived there in a state of slavery till within the last few years. As the condition of the parents was inherited by the children, there is little room for doubt, but that after a given time the local multiplication of the Blacks would have sufficed for all the wants of agriculture and industry, if the race had become acclimatised. The incessant activity of the slave trade, seems to show that the number of deaths must have greatly exceeded that of births. There appears to be no doubt as to the truth of the fact for the island of Cuba or for Jamaica. General Tulloch, struck by the mortality of the Negroes in the English Antilles, has not hesitated to declare that if the trade were once suppressed, the whole race would disappear in these islands before the close of a century. The researches of M. Boudin justify us in regarding this assertion as an exaggeration, at least as regards the French possessions. Neither the English nor the French author has, however, taken into consideration a circumstance, the importance of which cannot be denied. I allude to the conditions imposed upon the Negro by slavery. It is clear that the character and conduct of the master played an important part in the probability of the life or death of the slave. Without feeling himself to be, and without being inhuman, the master might demand more labour from him than his nature could support, or violate those instincts, the free play of which is necessary to health. This was certainly the case in Cuba, where it was the general practice to get as much out of the slaves as possible, thus creating the necessity for more frequent renewal. We have here, doubtless, one of those causes by which the mortality of a race, better fitted than ours for intertropical climates, is so immoderately increased. Facts seem to justify these conjectures. “Since the abolition of slavery,” says M. Elisée Reclus, “the Negro population has been on the increase in the English islands.”