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. 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,