But it is the test of longevity which exhibits the greatest triumph for civilization, because here the life-insurance tables furnish ample, though comparatively recent statistics.  Of course, in legendary ages all lives were of enormous length; and the Hindoos in their sacred books attribute to their progenitors a career of forty million years or thereabouts,—­what may safely be termed a ripe old age; for if a man were still unripe after celebrating his forty-millionth birthday, he might as well give it up.  But from the beginning of accurate statistics we know that the duration of life in any nation is a fair index of its progress in civilization, Quetelet gives statistics, more or less reliable, from every nation of Northern Europe, showing a gain of ten to twenty-five per cent, during the last century.  Where the tables are most carefully prepared, the result is least equivocal.  Thus, in Geneva, where accurate registers have been kept for three hundred years, it seems that from 1560 to 1600 the average lifetime of the citizens was twenty-one years and two months; in the next century, twenty-five years and nine months; in the century following, thirty-two years and nine months; and in the year 1833, forty years and five months:  thus nearly doubling the average age of man in Geneva, within those three centuries of social progress.  In France, it is estimated, that, in spite of revolutions and Napoleons, human life has been gaining at the rate of two months a year for nearly a century.  By a manuscript of the fourteenth century, moreover, it is shown that the rate of mortality in Paris was then one in sixteen,—­one person dying annually to every sixteen of the inhabitants.  It is now one in thirty-two,—­a gain of a hundred per cent, in five hundred years.  In England the progress has been far more rapid.  The rate of mortality in 1690 was one in thirty-three; in 1780 it was one in forty; and it stands now at one in sixty,—­the healthiest condition in Europe,—­while in half-barbarous Russia the rate of mortality is one in twenty-seven.  It would be easy to multiply these statistics to any extent; but they all point one way, and no medical statistician now pretends to oppose the dictum of Hufeland, that “a certain degree of culture is physically necessary for man, and promotes duration of life.”

The simple result is, that the civilized man is physically superior to the barbarian.  There is now no evidence that there exists in any part of the world a savage race who, taken as a whole, surpass or even equal the Anglo-Saxon type in average physical condition; as there is also none among whom the President elect of the United States and the Commander-in-chief of his armies would not be regarded as remarkably tall men, and Dr. Windship a remarkably strong one.  “It is now well known,” says Prichard, “that all savage races have less muscular power than civilized men.”  Johnstone in Northern Africa, and Cumming in Southern Africa, could find