| OCR Text |
Show 140 BY PATH AND TRAIL. Wheat has been forced to accommodate itself to the soil and climate of Sierra Leone, but only after an enormous loss and years of effort. Cochin China hens were introduced into the state of Colombia, South Amer ica, and it was twenty years before they were acclima tized. So that practically twenty generations perished before the few which survived chickenhood could adapt themselves to conditions and increase in numbers. Some thing analogous happens when members of the human family try to conform to altered conditions or enter upon a period of transition. It may end in complete disap pearance as in the case of the Tasmanians and Maoris, or be followed by a revival in vitality under new condi tions as among the Mexicans and Filipinos. When the missionary priests entered California they met a de composing race, whose excesses and prolonged physical suffering from exposure and frequent starvation had re duced them to degeneracy. Their extinction in their wild and brutalized state was sure to occur in, ethnologically, a very short time. No doubt the restraints of civiliza tion and the new conditions to which they were asked to conform hastened the inevitable. There is left to- day out of a population computed in 1698 to be six thousand, a scattered remnant of, perhaps, fifteen hundred. Before the expulsionof the fathers and the consequent abandonment of the missions, almost the entire peninsula was redeemed and its population Chris tianized and civilized. To- day the unorganized remnant roam th'e hills of Khada- Khama retaining a few Chris tian practices wrapt up in the rags of pagan supersti tion. WEen they disappear forever, there will be no Cooper to perpetuate their memory, or write a romance on " The Last of the Digger Indians. " |
