in solid columns miles on miles until, when they reach food resources to
their fancy, they deploy for action and take things with a rush. To stay
among them is to die; but no human being stays. A cry of "Drivers!" will
depopulate a village instantly, and a missionary who at one moment has been
combing brown ants from his hair will in the next find himself standing
safely in the creek or the water barrel, to stay until the drivers have
taken their leave. Among less spectacular things, mosquitoes fly in crowds
and leave fevers in their wake, gnats and flies are always on hand, chigoes
bore and breed under toe-nails, hook-worms hang themselves to the walls of
the intestines, and other threadlike worms enter the eyeballs and the flesh
of the body. Endurance through generations has given the people large
immunity from the effects of hook-worm and malaria, but not from the
indigenous diseases, kraw-kraw, yaws and elephantiasis, nor of course from
dysentery and smallpox which the Europeans introduced. Yet robust health is
fairly common, and where health prevails there is generally happiness, for
the negroes have that within their nature. They could not thrive in Guinea
without their temperament.

It is probable that no people ever became resident on or near the west
coast except under compulsion. From the more favored easterly regions
successive hordes have been driven after defeat in war. The Fangs on the
Ogowe are an example in the recent past. Thus the inhabitants of Guinea,
and of the coast lands especially, have survived by retreating and
adapting themselves to conditions in which no others wished to dwell. The
requirements of adaptation were peculiar. To live where nature supplies
Turkish baths without the asking necessitates relaxation. But since undue
physical indolence would unfit people for resistance to parasites and
hostile neighbors, the languid would perish. Relaxation of mind, however,
brought no penalties. The climate in fact not only discourages but
prohibits mental effort of severe or sustained character, and the negroes