We have therefore strong evidence that the essential change in the American type was effected in the last century, not in this.  Dr. E.H.  Clarke says, “A century does not afford a period long enough for the production of great changes.  That length of time could not transform the sturdy German fraeulein and robust English damsel into the fragile American miss.”  And yet it is pretty clear that the first century and a half of our colonial life had done just this for our grandmothers.  And, if so, our physiologists ought to conform their theories to the facts.

THE PHYSIQUE OF AMERICAN WOMEN

I was talking the other day with a New York physician, long retired from practice, who after an absence of a dozen years in Europe has returned within a year to this country.  He volunteered the remark, that nothing had so impressed him since his return as the improved health of Americans.  He said that his wife had been equally struck with it; and that they had noticed it especially among the inhabitants of cities, among the more cultivated classes, and in particular among women.

It so happened, that within twenty-four hours almost precisely the same remark was made to me by another gentleman of unusually cosmopolitan experience, and past middle age.  He further fortified himself by a similar assertion made him by Charles Dickens, in comparing his second visit to this country with his first.  In answer to an inquiry as to what points of difference had most impressed him, Dickens said, “Your people, especially the women, look better fed than formerly.”

It is possible that in all these cases the witnesses may have been led to exaggerate the original evil, while absent from the country, and so may have felt some undue reaction on their arrival.  One of my informants went so far as to express confidence that among his circle of friends in Boston and in London a dinner party of half a dozen Americans would outweigh an English party of the same number.  Granting this to be too bold a statement, and granting the unscientific nature of all these assertions, they still indicate a probability of their own truth until refuted by facts on the other side.  They are further corroborated by the surprise expressed by Huxley and some other recent Englishmen at finding us a race more substantial than they had supposed.

The truth seems to be, that Nature is endeavoring to take a new departure in the American, and to produce a race more finely organized, more sensitive, more pliable, and of more nervous energy, than the races of Northern Europe; that this change of type involves some risk to health in the process, but promises greater results whenever the new type shall be established.  I am confident that there has been within the last half-century a great improvement in the physical habits of the more cultivated classes, at least, in this country,—­better food, better air, better