y as it does of
Judaism, Buddhism, or Confucianism, only Christians, as a mass, have
practically forgotten it. The occupation followed by the Jews also in a
certain degree favors longevity, and the influence on heredity induced
by all these combined conditions goes for something. But it is not alone
in the matter of simple longevity--although that implies
considerable--that the Jewish race is found to be better situated.
Actual observations show them to be exempt from many diseases which
affect other races; so that it is not only that they recover more
promptly, but that they are not, as a class, subjected to the loss of
time by illness, or to the consequent sufferings due to illness or
disease, in anything like or like ratio with other people.

There is also a less tendency to criminality, debauchery, and
intemperance in the race; this, again, can in a measure be ascribed to
their family influence, which even in our day has not lost that
patriarchal influence which tinges the home or family life in the Old
Testament. Crimes against the person or property committed by Jews are
rare. They likewise do not figure in either police courts or
penitentiary records; they are not inmates of our poor-houses, but, what
is also singular, they are never accused of many silly crimes, such as
indecent exposures, assaults on young girls; nor do they figure in any
such exposures as the one recently made by the _Pall Mall Gazette_.

After allowing all that, which we can, in its fullest limit, to
religion, family, or social habit, there is still a wide margin to be
accounted for. This has naturally let the inquiry, followed in the
course of this book, into a careful review of the Jewish people; into
their religion and its character, its relation to other creeds, and to
the world's history; into their many wanderings, and into the
dispersion, and we have even been obliged to follow them into the midst
of the people among whom they have become nationed, to try, if possible,
to find the cause of this racial difference in health, resistance to
disease, decay, and death. It has been necessary, in following out the
research, to give a condensed _resume_ of the religious, political, and
social condition of the Jewish commonwealth, which, although in a state
of dispersion, still exists. I need offer no apology for the extended
notice this has received in the course of the book. We read with
increasing interest either Hallam or May, Buckle or Gui