Yet, when first, upon the prairies of Nebraska, I came in sight of a tribe of genuine, unadulterated Indians, with no possession on earth but a bow and arrow and a bear-skin,—­bare-skin in a double sense, I might add,—­my instinctive exclamation was, “What race of dwarfs is this?” They were the descendants of the glorious Pawnees of Cooper, the heroes of every boy’s imagination; yet, excepting the three chiefs, who were noble-looking men of six feet in height, the tallest of the tribe could not have measured five feet six inches.

The most careful investigations give the same results in respect to physical strength.  Early travellers among our Indians, as Hearne and Mackenzie, and early missionaries to the South-Sea Islands, as Ellis, report athletic contests in which the natives could not equal the better-fed, better-clothed, better-trained Europeans.  When the French savans, Peron, Regnier, Ransonnet, carried their dynamometers to the islands of the Indian Ocean, they found with surprise that an average English sailor was forty-two per cent, stronger, and an average Frenchman thirty per cent, stronger, than the strongest island tribe they visited.  Even in comparing different European races, it is undeniable that bodily strength goes with the highest civilization.  It is recorded in Robert Stephenson’s Life, that, when the English “navvies” were employed upon the Paris and Boulogne Railway, they used spades and barrows just twice the size of those employed by their Continental rivals, and were regularly paid double.  Quetelet’s experiments with the dynamometer on university students showed the same results:  first ranked the Englishman, then the Frenchman, then the Belgian, then the Russian, then the Southern European:  for those races of Southern Europe which once ruled the Eastern and the Western worlds by physical and mental power have lost in strength as they have paused in civilization, and the easy victories of our armies in Mexico show us the result.

It is impossible to deny that the observations on this subject are yet very imperfect; and the only thing to be claimed is, that they all point one way.  So far as absolute statistical tables go, the above-named French observations have till recently stood almost alone, and have been the main reliance.  The just criticism has, however, been made, that the subjects of these experiments were the inhabitants of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land, by no means the strongest instances on the side of barbarism.  It is, therefore, fortunate that the French tables have now been superseded by some more important comparisons, accurately made by A.S.  Thomson, M.D., Surgeon of the Fifty-Eighth Regiment of the British Army, and printed in the seventeenth volume of the Journal of the London Statistical Society.