CHAPTER XI. PUEBLA. NOPALUCÁN. ORIZABA. POTRERO.

The only intelligible solution I can find for this problem is that given by Sartorius, whose work on Mexico is well known in Germany, and has been translated and published in England. This author’s remarks on the condition of the Indians are very valuable; and, as he was for years a planter in this very district, he may be taken as an excellent authority on the subject. He considers the evil to lie principally in the diet and habits of the people. The children are not weaned till very late, and then are allowed to feed all day without restriction on boiled maize, or beans, or whatever other vegetable diet may be eaten by the family. The climate does not dispose them to take much exercise; so that this unwholesome cramming with vegetable food has nothing to counteract its evil effects, and the poor little children get miserably pot-bellied and scrofulous,—an observation of which we can confirm the truth. A great proportion of the children die young, and those that grow up have their constitutions impaired. Then they live in close communities, and marry “in-and-in,” so that the effect of unhealthy living becomes strengthened into hereditary disease; and habitual intemperance does its work upon their constitutions, though the quantities of raw spirits they consume appear to produce scarcely any immediate effect. Among a race in this bodily condition, the ordinary epidemics of the country—cholera, small-pox, and dysentery—make fearful havoc. Whole villages have often been depopulated in a few days by these diseases; and a deadly fever which used to appear from time to time among the Indians, until the last century, sometimes carried off ten thousand and twenty thousand at once. It seemed to me worth while to make some remarks about this question, with a view of showing that the theory as to the relation between food and population, though partly true, is not wholly so; and that in the region of which we have been speaking it can be clearly shown to fail.