And again, it is now satisfactorily demonstrated that these picked
survivors of savage life are commonly suffering under the same diseases
with their civilized compeers, and show less vital power to resist them.
In barbarous nations every foreigner is taken for a physician, and the
first demand is for medicines; if not the right medicines, then the
wrong ones; if no medicines are at hand, the written prescription,
administered internally, is sometimes found a desirable restorative. The
earliest missionaries to the South-Sea Islands found ulcers and dropsy
and hump-backs there before them. The English Bishop of New Zealand,
landing on a lone islet where no ship had ever touched, found the
whole population prostrate with influenza. Lewis and Clarke, the first
explorers of the Rocky Mountains, found Indian warriors ill with fever
and dysentery, rheumatism and paralysis, and Indian women in hysterics.
"The tooth-ache," said Roger Williams of the New England tribes, "is the
only paine which will force their stoute hearts to cry"; even the Indian
women, he says, never cry as he has heard "some of their men in this
paine"; but Lewis and Clarke found whole tribes who had abolished this
source of tears in the civilized manner, by having no teeth left. We
complain of our weak eyes as a result of civilized habits, and Tennyson,
in "Locksley Hall," wishes his children bred in some savage land, "not
with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books." But savage life
seems more injurious to the organs of vision than even the type of a
cheap edition; for the most vigorous barbarians--on the prairies, in
Southern archipelagos, on African deserts--suffer more from different
forms of ophthalmia than from any other disease; without knowing the
alphabet, they have worse eyes than if they were professors, and have
not even the melancholy consolation of spectacles.

Again, the savage cannot, as a general rule, endure transplantation,--he