ANTONIO GARCÍA CUBAS.

In this mortality there were one hundred and forty children. In the year 1869, although the data show an augmentation of fifty-nine persons in the population, the infant deaths number sixty-five, to thirty-four of adults.

One fact ought to particularly call our attention because it proves that the degradation of the race is not in its constitution but in the customs of its members. The Indian women of the villages near the Capital, hiring themselves out as nurses in private homes, rear healthful and robust children, because in their new employment they improve their condition, by enforced cleanliness, by good food, and by the total change in their hygienic conditions. But this very circumstance is a serious misfortune for the race, the women impelled by the desire to gain better wages, abandoning their own children to the mercenary cares of other women, as if the lack of a mother’s love and care could be made good!

Another of the reasons which, in my opinion, cause the degeneration of the indigenous race, is that marriage takes place unwisely and prematurely. According to medical opinion, the nubile age of woman in our country is eighteen years, in the hot lands fourteen; between medical theory and actual practice there is an enormous difference. As regards the Indians, frequently union occurs between a woman scarcely arrived at the term of her development and a man of forty years or more, entirely developed and robust; as a consequence, the woman becomes debilitated and infirm and her children are weak and degenerate.

If to these causes, which operate so powerfully toward the decrease of the indigenous race, is added the sensible diminution it has suffered in our civil wars,—since the indigenous race supplies far the larger part of the army—the truth of my assertion seems fully corroborated.