Six
months later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease
spread like fire about the valley, and in less than a year two
survivors, a man and a woman, fled from the newly-created solitude....
Early in the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, the
first case of phthisis appeared in a household of 17 persons, and by the
end of August, when the tale was told me, one soul survived, a boy who
had been absent at his schooling."
In Tasmania is another good illustration of the evolution of a race
proceeding so rapidly as to be fatal to the race. When the first
English settled on the island, in 1803, the native population consisted
of several thousand. Tuberculosis and many other new diseases, and, most
of all, alcohol, began to operate on the aborigines, who were attracted
to the settlements of the whites. In a quarter of a century there were
only a few hundred left. Many, of course, had met violent deaths, but an
enlightened perusal of any history of the period,[64] will leave no
doubt that natural selection by disease was responsible for most of the
mortality. By 1847 the number of native Tasmanians was reduced to 44,
who were already unmistakably doomed by alcohol and bacteria.
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