............. 151 35.36 inches.
Soldiers 58th Regiment........... 628 36.71 "

STRENGTH IN LIFTING.
New-Zealanders................... 31 367 pounds.
Students fit Edinburgh, aged 25.. ---- 416 "
Soldiers 58th Regiment........... 33 422 "

NOTE. The range of strength among the New-Zealanders was from 250
pounds to 420 pounds; among the soldiers, from 350 pounds to 504 pounds.

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 twent