The Popular Science Monthly, September, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900Various
Science
The Popular Science Monthly, September, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Rapid transportation and rapid communication between the tropic and
temperate regions will rob the former of many terrors. When a person
can communicate with his family every few days, or by telegraph in a
few hours, and when he knows he can reach his old home readily, one
element which disturbed former pioneers is removed.
Rapid transportation and the discovery of the process of canning
fruits, vegetables and meats, together with the process of
manufacturing ice, and of cold storage methods, make it possible for a
person in a hot country to enjoy the foods to which he was accustomed
in his old home. This will be a great help until he has learned to use
native products.
Education and good laws will remove from the Tropics many undesirable
features which now repel people from the North. It has been already
remarked that the people in these islands have no knowledge of
sanitation, and live in utter disregard of all the well-known rules
of hygiene. Some of the most striking examples of this are the living
in their own excretions, sleeping in air-tight compartments, the lack
of a variety of food, working long hours in the hot sun with an empty
stomach, using rum, tobacco and coffee in place of food, the utter
lack of any restraint of the sexual instinct by either men or women of
the lower classes and by the men of all classes, producing a well-nigh
universal corruption of blood.
These unsanitary and unhygienic conditions have dwarfed the tropical
dwellers in body and in mind. These things cannot be laid to the
climate. They are due to ignorance. The same condition would produce
similar results in Pennsylvania or Connecticut, and such results were
seen a generation ago in New Mexico, California and elsewhere.
The laws under which these people have been living have been
monstrously bad. Marriage has in some cases been actually discouraged;
there was little opportunity and little inducement to accumulate
property. There were few schools, and they were of poor quality. The
different races, white, Indian and African, have fully commingled, and
the result the world knows is bad. The strongest arguments against the
mixing of the Caucasian and the African are to be found in the West
India Islands. The mixed races will be much harder to deal with than
pure bloods of any race.
The climate in Cuba and Porto Rico--and the same is claimed for the
Philippines--is equal to any in the States south of the Carolinas. With
the masses educated and with wholesome laws, these islands will all
become garden spots, and will ultimately be occupied by pure-blooded
Anglo-Saxons, the present inhabitants disappearing before the stronger
and purer-blooded race.
DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE.
_POETRY AND SCIENCE._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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