Note 1427 — Chapter XVII · —The Influence Of Climate

Climatic contrasts aid differentiation also by influencing both natural and artificial selection in the distribution of peoples. This effect is conspicuous in the distribution of immigrants in all colonial lands like Africa, South America and in every part of the United States.1427 The warm, moist air of the Gulf and South Atlantic States is attracting back to the congenial habitat of the "black belt" the negroes of the North, where, moreover, their numbers are being further depleted by a harsh climate, which finds in them a large proportion of the unfit. The presence of a big negro laboring class in the South, itself primarily a result of climate, has long served to exclude foreign immigration, which sought therefore the unoccupied lands and the congenial climate of the more bracing North. Hence it is both a direct and indirect effect of climate that the North shows a large proportion of aliens, and the white population of the South an almost unadulterated English stock.