Narrative of the surveying voyages of his majesty's ships Adventure and Beagle (vol.3)

520 NEW SOUTH WALES. Jati. 1836. more numerous than the first, and not so well clothed. This decrease, no doubt, must be partly owing to the introduction of spirits, to European diseases (even the milder ones of which, as the measles,* prove very destructive), and to the gradual extinction of the wild animals. It is said that num- bers of their children invariably perish in very early infancy from the effects of their wandering life. As the difficulty of procuring food increases, so must their wandering habits and hence the population, without any apparent deaths from famine, is repressed in a manner extremely sudden com- pared to what happens in civilized countries, where the father may add to his labour, without destroying his offspring. Besides these several evident causes of destruction, there appears to be some more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and AustraUa, and we shall find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone, that thus acts the destroyer ; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archi- pelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other ; in the same way as cUfferent species of animals — the stronger always extir- pating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children. Every one has heard of the inexplicable reduction of the population in the beautiful and healthy island of Tahiti since the date of Captain Cook's voyages : although in that case we might have expected it would have been otherwise ; for infanticide, which formerly * It is remarkable how the same disease is modified in different climates. At the little island of St. Helena, the introduction of scarlet fever is dreaded as a plague. In some countries, foreigners and natives are as differently affected by certain contagious disorders, as if they had been dif- ferent animals ; of which fact some instances have occurred in Chile and, according to Humboldt, in Mexico. (Polit. Essay on Kingdoni of J^ew Spain, vol. iv.)