Even the marvels of modern industry, whilst facilitating immigration into distant lands, make it more dangerous. Railways and steamers have reduced the longest journeys to a mere nothing. Lands, which it took our ancestors centuries to people, distances which our own fathers could only travel over in several months, are accomplished by us in a few days. We have here, then, yet another to be added to the many difficulties of acclimatisation. It is a common thing in Paris to hear men complain of the effects of a mere journey from Algiers. The rapidity of the transit gives a shock to the organisation, although tending to replace it under its natural conditions of life. The shock is necessarily greater when the journey is made in the other direction, and we go against our physical habits, instead of returning to them. And, when after a few days’ voyage, instead of Algiers, we land at Rio de Janeiro or the Antilles, the shock must be great indeed. Modern civilisation is also answerable to a great extent for the losses involved by every settlement in a climate differing too widely from our own. By reason of the security with which she surrounds the poor as well as the rich, of the at least relative ease which is enjoyed by all classes of society, we are little prepared for the struggle for existence. Without going so far back as primitive man or the Aryans, let us simply call to mind Balbao, Pizarro, Cortez, Soto, Monbars, and their rough companions; can the present generation offer such a resistance as theirs? It is not, however, by its luxuries only that civilisation renders us unfit to confront the chances of acclimatisation. It is also, and principally, by the vices which too often accompany it. M. Bolot, who was in charge of a number of men employed for the construction of a pier at Grand Bassam, said to Captain Vallon: “A Sunday will put more of my men in the hospital, than three days of work in the full heat of the sun.” This was because Sunday was given up to debauchery. Here, again, is a fact forming, so to speak, an experiment such as might have been imagined by a physiologist. The Isle of Bourbon passes for one of those disastrous climates to which the European cannot become acclimatised. The tables of mortality which relate to the whole population do, in fact, show that the deaths exceed the births to a formidable extent. This is, however, another of those sweeping results, into which we must inquire if we wish to understand its true meaning. The Whites of Bourbon form, in reality, two classes, or rather two races, distinct in their manners and customs. The former includes the population of towns and large settlements, who lead the ordinary life of colonists, and especially avoid agricultural labour, considered by Creoles as degrading as well as fatal. The latter includes the _Mean Whites_, descendants of the original colonists, who, too poor to buy slaves, were forced to cultivate the land with their own hands.