galton.org 205
Influence of Man upon Race
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The last 300 or 400 years, say the last ten generations of mankind,
have witnessed changes of population on the largest scale, by the
extension of races long resident in Europe to the temperate regions of
Asia, Africa, America, and Australasia.
Siberia was barely known to the Russians of nine generations ago, but
since that time it has been continuously overspread by their colonists,
soldiers, political exiles, and transported criminals; already some two-
thirds of its population are Slaves.
In South Africa the settlement at the Cape of Good Hope is barely six
generations old, yet during that time a curious and continuous series of
changes has taken place, resulting in the substitution of an alien
population for the Hottentots in the south and the Bantus in the north.
One-third of it is white, consisting of Dutch, English, descendants of
French Huguenot refugees, some Germans and Portuguese, and the
remainder is a strange medley of Hottentot, Bantu, Malay, and Negro
elements. In North Africa Egypt has become infiltrated with Greeks,
Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen during the last two generations, and
Algeria with Frenchmen.
In North America the change has been most striking, from a sparse
Indian population of hunters into that of the present inhabitants of the
United States and Canada; the former of these, with its total of fifty
millions inhabitants, already contains more than forty-three millions of
whites, chiefly of English origin; that is more of European blood than is to
be found in any one of the five great European kingdoms of England,
France, Italy, Germany, and Austria, and less than that of Russia alone.
The remainder are chiefly black, the descendants of slaves imported from
Africa. In the Dominion of Canada, with its much smaller population of
four millions, there has been a less, but still a complete, swamping of the
previous Indian element by incoming whites.
In South America, and thence upwards to Mexico inclusive, the
population has been infiltrated in some parts and transformed in others, by
Spanish blood and by that of the Negroes whom they introduced, so that
not one half of its population can be reckoned as of pure Indian descent.
