to have been a most astounding renovation of female health in such establishments throughout all England since that time,—­the simple result of sanitary laws.  What science has done science can do.  Everybody knows which symptom of American physical decay is habitually quoted, as most alarming; one seldom sees a dentist who does not despair of the republic.  Yet this calamity is nothing new; the elder branch of our race has been through that epidemic, and outlived it.  In the robust days of Queen Bess, the teeth of the court ladies were habitually so black and decayed, that foreigners used constantly to ask if Englishwomen ate nothing but sugar.  Hentzner, who visited the country in 1697, speaks of the same calamity as common among the English of all classes.  Two centuries and a half have removed the stigma,—­improved physical habits have put fresh pearls between the lips of all England now; and there seems no reason why we Americans may not yet be healthy, in spite of our teeth.

Thus much for general considerations; let us come now to more specific tests, beginning with the comparison of size.  The armor of the knights of the Middle Ages is too small for their modern descendants:  Hamilton Smith records that two Englishmen of average dimensions found no suit large enough to fit them in the great collection of Sir Samuel Meyrick.  The Oriental sabre will not admit the English hand, nor the bracelet of the Kaffir warrior the English arm.  The swords found in Roman tumuli have handles inconveniently small; and the great mediaeval two-handed sword is now supposed to have been used only for one or two blows at the first onset, and then exchanged for a smaller one.  The statements given by Homer, Aristotle, and Vitruvius represent six feet as a high standard for full-grown men; and the irrefutable evidence of the ancient doorways, bedsteads, and tombs proves the average size of the race to have certainly not diminished in modern days.  The gigantic bones have all turned out to be animal remains; even the skeleton twenty-five feet high and ten feet broad, which one savant wrote a book called “Gigantosteologia” to prove human, and another, a counter-argument, called “Gigantomachia,” to prove animal,—­neither of the philosophers taking the trouble to draw a single fragment of the fossil.  The enormous savage races have turned out, as has been shown, to be travellers’ tales,—­even the Patagonians being brought down to an average of five feet ten inches, and being, moreover, only a part of a race, the Abipones, of which the other families are smaller.  Indeed, we can all learn by our own experience how irresistible is the tendency of the imagination to attribute vast proportions to all hardy and warlike tribes.  Most persons fancy the Scottish Highlanders, for instance, to have been a race of giants; yet Charles Edward was said to be taller than any man in his Highland army, and his height was but five feet nine.  We have the same impression in regard to our own Aborigines.