ulptor and painter place before
us the finest imaginative types of strength, grace, and beauty, so
the silent artist, civilisation, approaches nearer and nearer to
perfection, and by evolution of form and mind developes what is
practically a new order of physical and mental build. Peron,--who
first used, if he did not invent, the little instrument, the
dynamometer, or muscular-strength measurer,--subjected persons
of different stages of civilisation to the test of his gauge, and
discovered that the strength of the limbs of the natives of Van
Diemen's Land and New Holland was as 50 degrees of power, while that
of the Frenchmen was 69, and of the Englishmen 71. The same order
of facts are maintained in respect to the size of body. The stalwart
Englishman of to-day can neither get into the armour nor be placed in
the sarcophagus of those sons of men who were accounted the heroes of
the infantile life of the human world.

We discover, moreover, from our view of the past, that the
developments of tenacity of life and of vital power have been
comparatively rapid in their course when they have once commenced.
There is nothing discoverable to us that would lead to the conception
of a human civilisation extending back over two hundred generations;
and when in these generations we survey the actual effect of
civilisation, so fragmentary and overshadowed by persistent
barbarism, in influencing disease and mortality, we are reduced to the
observation of at most twelve generations, including our own, engaged,
indirectly or directly, in the work of sanitary progress. During
this comparatively brief period, the labour of which, until within a
century, has had no systematic direction, the changes for good that
have been effected are amongst the most startling of historical facts.
Pestilences which decimated populations, and which, like the great
plague of London, destroyed 7,165 people in a single week, have lost
their virulency; gaol fever has disappeared, and our gaols, once each
a plague-spot, have become, by a strange perversion of civilisation,
the health spots of, at least, one kingdom. The term, Black Death, is
heard no more; and ague, from which the London physician once made a
fortune, is now a rare tax even on the skill of the hardworked Union
Medical Officer.

From the study of the past we are warranted, then, in assuming that
civilisation, unaided by special scientific knowledge, reduces disease
and lessens mortality, an