d streams in their birch-bark canoes, fraternizing with Indians
who were their only companions in that bleak interior, and married often
to dusky squaws, became assimilated to the savage life about them and
reverted to the lower hunter stage of civilization.[76]

[Sidenote: The Boers of South Africa]

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 Engl