Huguenot or English Catholic.

[Sidenote: Indirect effect through isolation.]

Such colonists in a remote country were necessarily few and could not be
readily reinforced from home. Their new and isolated geographical
environment favored variation. Heredity passed on the characteristics of
a small, highly selected group. The race was kept pure from intermixture
with the aborigines of the country, owing to the social and cultural
abyss which separated them, and to the steady withdrawal of the natives
before the advance of the whites. The homogeneity of island peoples
seems to indicate that individual variations are in time communicated by
heredity to a whole population under conditions of isolation; and in
this way modifications due to artificial selection and a changed
environment become widely spread.

Nor is this all. The modified type soon becomes established, because the
abundance of land at the disposal of the colonists and the consequent
better conditions of living encourage a rapid increase of population. A
second geographic factor of mere area here begins to operate. Ease in
gaining subsistence, the greater independence of the individual and the
family, emancipation from carking care, the hopeful attitude of mind
engendered by the consciousness of an almost unlimited opportunity and
capacity for expansion, the expectation of large returns upon labor,
and, finally, the profound influence of this hopefulness upon the
national character, all combined, produce a social rejuvenation of the
race. New conditions present new problems which call for prompt and
original solution, make a demand upon the ingenuity and resourcefulness
of the individual, and therefore work to the same end as his previous
removal from the paralyzing effect of custom in the old home country.