However singular this fact may appear to some anthropologists, it is only a repetition of what took place in Brazil. There again, it was said, that the slave trade alone maintained a black population, which was destined to diminish and disappear as soon as this enforced immigration should cease. Authentic documents show that the opposite has taken place. The slave trade was abolished long before slavery in this great Empire. For many years the proprietors, being unable to purchase fresh slaves, took care of those in their possession, and from that time the Negroes have multiplied. Thus it was that during the period in which the missionaries of the Jesuits flourished, that portion of the black race in which they were interested was observed to increase in an extraordinary manner, whilst in the rich haciendas, where it was uncared for and overworked, it dwindled away. By the side of the Negro Creole, there are now in the French Antilles labourers engaged more or less voluntarily from the same coasts of Africa, representatives of the Semitic white race from Madeira, Chinese of yellow race, and Indian coolies, who are almost all dravidian, and consequently a cross between the black and the yellow. It will be interesting at some future time, to show what resistance each of these nations has offered to the terrible climate they are confronting. The experiment is, at present, only begun. Nevertheless M. Walther has already obtained some interesting data at Guadeloupe. The mean annual mortality of the Creoles is 3·28 per 100; that of immigrants, 9·66 for the Chinese; 7·68 for Negroes; 7·12 for Hindoos; and 5·80 for the natives of Madeira. Unfortunately, the statistics are doubtful, and differ from those which M. Du Hailly has given for Martinique. They must, however, both be recorded as the starting point for new study. There is, moreover, no cause for despair. It is clear, for example, that the natives of Madeira will very quickly become acclimatised in Guadeloupe, as is already the case in Cuba, and the much more serious mortality of the Negro, Chinese, and Hindoo races does not prove the impossibility of their ever inhabiting these islands. VII. The conditions of life and the nature of the race are not all in the numerous problems raised by acclimatisation. Man, even individually, brings his special elements to bear upon it. The savage and the modern European are placed, by the mere fact of the social differences which separate them, in conditions often opposite, and not always in favour of the latter.