the air of the Transvaal is too stimulating for a life of high tension and excitement.  There are even signs that the same may be true in a minor degree of the United States of America.  Both the capitalist and the working man, if they come of English stock, seem to wear out more quickly than at home; and the sterility of marriages among the long settled American families is so pronounced that it can hardly be due entirely to voluntary restriction of parentage.  The effects of an unsuitable climate are especially shown in nervous disorders, and are therefore likely to tell most heavily on those who engage in intellectual pursuits, and perhaps on women rather more than on men.  The sterilising effects of women’s higher education in America are incontrovertible, though this inference is hotly denied in England.  At Holyoake College it was found that only half the lady graduates afterwards married, and the average family of those who did marry was less than two children.  At Bryn Mawr only 43 per cent, married, and had 0.84 children each; the average family per graduate was therefore 0.37.  If it be objected that new immigrants and their children are healthy and vigorous in America, it may be truly answered that the effects of an unfavourable climate are manifested fully only in the third and later generations.  The argument may be further supported by the fate of black men who try to settle in Europe.  Their strongly pigmented skin, which seems to protect them from the actinic rays of the tropical sun, so noxious to Europeans, and their broad nostrils, which inhale a larger number of tubercle bacilli than the narrow nose-slits of the Northerner, are disadvantages in a temperate climate.  In any case, of the many thousands of negro servants who lived in England in the eighteenth century, it would be difficult to find a single descendant.

But there are other factors in the problem which should make us beware of hasty generalisations.  It is obvious that since the American Republic contains many climates in its vast area, there may be parts of it which are perfectly healthy for Anglo-Saxons, and other parts where they cannot live without degenerating.  Very few athletes, we are told, come from south of the fortieth parallel of latitude.  But the decline in the birth-rate is most marked in the older colonies, the New England States, where for a long period the English colonists, living mainly on the land, not only throve and developed a singularly virile type of humanity, but multiplied with almost unexampled rapidity.  The same is true not only of the French Canadian farmers, but of the South African Boers, who rear enormous families in a climate very different from that of Holland.  The inference is that Europeans living on the land may flourish in any tolerably healthy climate which is not tropical.