Malaria, that curse of the Circassian race, which is the chief source of
the inefficiency and mortality of their efforts of colonizations in
semi-tropical climes, exerts but little influence upon the negroes, and
hence they are admirably qualified for the occupation of pestilential
soils.
It appears from the statistics of the English that remittent and
intermittent fevers, which prove the great source of inefficiency and
mortality among the white troops in tropical climes, exert comparatively
but little influence upon the blacks.
The writer has observed the fatal effects of the pernicious fevers upon
the white inhabitants of the low coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, and
has seen men perish in a single night from the deadly action of the
miasms, whilst the negroes were unaffected.
During the English expedition up the Nile nearly all the whites were
prostrated by fevers, and none of the native blacks were affected. After
the French landed at Vera Cruz the yellow fever found great numbers of
victims among the Europeans; but according to the report of the
inspector-general, Regnaud, not one of the 600 negro soldiers and sailors
from the West Indies, though hard at work there, were attacked, or rather
not one of them died. There are hundreds of similar examples to illustrate
the theory.
We cannot escape the mephitism of the soil. So long as we respire the air,
so long shall we receive into the system the deleterious vapors by the
respiratory apparatus, which is the most perfect of the absorbing agents:
the time of effect is determined only by the health, the strength, and
vigor of our forces. The destroying elements may take effect at once, or
they may be resisted for a long, though definite period of time. Malaria
alone has a wide range among the causes of human misery, and it is
believed to cause more than half of the mortality of the human families on
the globe.
Its deadly action, in depopulating cities and provinces, is well attested
in history, and its effect upon the intellectual expansion is still more
marked; sadness, languor, paludal cachexia, scrofulous, deformed, and
short-lived offspring, are among its train of evils. In the Roman states
alone, sixty thousand perish every year from this paludal influence. These
deltas of the Southern States are among the greater miasmatic foyers of
the world, and are as deadly in their miasms as the Campagna of Italy or
the Sunderbunds of Hindostan.