table degeneracy in this
foreign climate. I have even seen it doubted whether a race of men can
ever become thoroughly naturalized in a locality to which it is not
indigenous. To such vagaries it is a sufficient answer that the English
are no more indigenous to England than to America. They are indigenous
to Central Asia, and as they have survived the first transplantation,
they may be safely counted on to survive the second. A more careful
survey will teach us that the slow alteration of physique which is
going on in this country is only an exaggeration of that which modern
civilization is tending to bring about everywhere. It is caused by the
premature and excessive strain upon the mental powers requisite to meet
the emergencies of our complex life. The progress of events has thrown
the work of sustaining life so largely upon the brain that we are
beginning to sacrifice the physical to the intellectual. We are growing
spirituelle in appearance at the expense of robustness. Compare any
typical Greek face, with its firm muscles, its symmetry of feature, and
its serenity of expression, to a typical modern portrait, with its more
delicate contour, its exaggerated forehead, its thoughtful, perhaps
jaded look. Or consider in what respects the grand faces of the
Plantagenet monarchs differ from the refined countenances of the leading
English statesmen of to-day. Or again, consider the familiar pictures of
the Oxford and Harvard crews which rowed a race on the Thames in 1869,
and observe how much less youthful are the faces of the Americans. By
contrast they almost look careworn. The summing up of countless such
facts is that modern civilization is making us nervous. Our most
formidable diseases are of nervous origin. We seem to have got rid of
the mediaeval plague and many of its typhoid congeners; but instead
we have an increased amount of insanity, methomania, consumption,
dyspepsia, and paralysis. In this fact it is plainly written that we are
suffering physically from the over-work and over-excitement entailed by
excessive hurry.

In view of these various but nearly related points of difference between
ancient and modern life as studied in their extreme manifestations, it
cannot be denied that while we have gained much, we have also lost a
good deal that is valuable, in our progress. We cannot but suspect that
we are not in all points more highly favoured than the ancients. And it
becomes probable that Athens, at all eve