llection and the same present
experience of the height of crowds of well-dressed persons. I used
always to get a fair view of what was going on over or between their
heads; I rarely can do so now.

[Footnote 1: _Trans. Brit. Assoc_., 1881, Table V., p. 242; and
remarks by Mr. Roberts, p. 235.]

The athletic achievements at school and college are much superior to
what they used to be. Part is no doubt due to more skilful methods
of execution, but not all. I cannot doubt that the more wholesome
and abundant food, the moderation in drink, the better cooking, the
warmer wearing apparel, the airier sleeping rooms, the greater
cleanliness, the more complete change in holidays, and the healthier
lives led by the women in their girlhood, who become mothers
afterwards, have a great influence for good on the favoured portion
of our race.

The proportion of weakly and misshapen individuals is not to be
estimated by those whom we meet in the streets; the worst cases are
out of sight. We should parade before our mind's eye the inmates of
the lunatic, idiot, and pauper asylums, the prisoners, the patients
in hospitals, the sufferers at home, the crippled, and the
congenitally blind, and that large class of more or less wealthy
persons who flee to the sunnier coasts of England, or expatriate
themselves for the chance of life. There can hardly be a sadder
sight than the crowd of delicate English men and women with narrow
chests and weak chins, scrofulous, and otherwise gravely affected,
who are to be found in some of these places. Even this does not tell
the whole of the story; if there were a conscription in England, we
should find, as in other countries, that a large fraction of the men
who earn their living by sedentary occupations are unfit for
military service. Our human civilised stock is far more weakly
through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of
animals, whether wild or domestic.

It is, however, by no means the most shapely or the biggest
personages who endure hardship the best. Some very shabby-looking
men have extraordinary stamina. Sickly-looking and puny residents in
towns may have a more suitable constitution for the special
conditions of their lives, and may in some sense be better knit and
do more work and live longer than much haler men imported to the
same locality from elsewhere. A wheel and a barrel seem to have the
flimsiest possible constitutions; they consist of numerous separate
pi