Another pronounced instance of rapid retrogression under new unfavorable geographic conditions is afforded by the South African Boer.  The transfer from the busy commercial cities of the Rhine mouths to the far-away periphery of the world’s trade, from the intensive agriculture of small deltaic gardens and the scientific dairy farming of the moist Netherlands to the semi-arid pastures of the high, treeless veldt, where they were barred from contact with the vivifying sea and its ship-borne commerce, has changed the enterprising seventeenth century Hollander into the conservative pastoral Boer.  Dutch cleanliness has necessarily become a tradition to a people who can scarcely find water for their cattle.  The comfort and solid bourgeois elegance of the Dutch home lost its material equipment in the Great Trek, when the long wagon journey reduced household furniture to its lowest terms.  House-wifely habits and order vanished in the semi-nomadic life which followed.[77] The gregarious instinct, bred by the closely-packed population of little Holland, was transformed to a love of solitude, which in all lands characterizes the people of a remote and sparsely inhabited frontier.  It is a common saying that the Boer cannot bear to see another man’s smoke from his stoep, just as the early Trans-Allegheny pioneer was always on the move westward, because he could not bear to hear his neighbor’s watch-dog bark.  Even the Boer language has deteriorated under the effects of isolation and a lower status of civilization.  The native Taal differs widely from the polished speech of Holland; it preserves some features of the High Dutch of two centuries ago, but has lost inflexions and borrowed words for new phenomena from the English, Kaffirs and Hottentots; can express no abstract ideas, only the concrete ideas of a dull, work-a-day world.[78]

The new habitat may eliminate many previously acquired characteristics and hence transform a people, as in the case of the Boers; or it may intensify tribal or national traits, as in the seafaring propensities of the Angles and Saxons when transferred to Britain, and of the seventeenth century English when transplanted to the indented coasts of New England; or it may tolerate mere survival or the slow dissuetude of qualities which escape any particular pressure in the new environment, and which neither benefit nor handicap in the modified struggle for existence.

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

[34] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap.  V, p. 166.  New York, 1895.

[35] E. Virchow, Rassenbildung und Erblichkeit, Bastian Festschrift, pp. 14, 43, 44.  Berlin, 1896.

[36] Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 34-35.  New York, 1899.

[37] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap.  I, pp. 8-9.  New York, 1895.

[38] P. Ehrenreich, Die Urbewohner Brasiliens, p. 30.  Braunschweig, 1897.

[39] Ratzel, Die Erde und das Leben, Vol.  I, pp. 364, 365.  Leipzig and Vienna, 1901.