on is easy. For about a hundred years the military
selection committees had broken with the blind routine of the past and
made it a practice to pick out carefully the strongest and best made
among the young men, in order to exempt them from the burden of military
service which had become purely mechanical, and to send to the depot all
the weaklings who were good enough to fulfil the sorely diminished
functions of the soldier and even of the non-commissioned officer. That
was really a piece of intelligent selection; and the historian cannot
conscientiously refuse gratefully to praise this innovation, thanks to
which the incomparable beauty of the human race to-day has been
gradually developed. In fact, when we now look through the glass cases
of our museums of antiquities at those singular collections of
caricatures which our ancestors used to call their photographic albums,
we can confirm the vastness of the progress thus accomplished, if it is
really true that we are actually descended from these dwarfs and
scare-crows, as an otherwise trustworthy tradition attests.

From this epoch dates the discovery of the last microbes, which had not
yet been analysed by the neo-Pasteurian school. Once the cause of every
disease was known, the remedy was not long in becoming known as well,
and from that moment, a consumptive or rheumatic patient, or an invalid
of any kind became as rare a phenomenon as a double-headed monster
formerly was, or an honest publican. Ever since that epoch we have
dropped the ridiculous employment of those inquiries about health with
which the conversations of our ancestors were needlessly interlarded,
such as "How are you?" or "How do you do?" Short-sightedness alone
continued its lamentable progress, being stimulated by the extraordinary
spread of journalism. There was not a woman or a child, who did not wear
a _pince-nez_. This drawback, which besides was only momentary, was
largely compensated for by the progress it caused in the optician's art.

Alongside of the political unity which did away with the enmities of
nations, there appeared a linguistic unity which rapidly blotted out the
last differences between them. Already since the twentieth century the
need of a single common language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages,
had become sufficiently intense among the learned throughout the whole
world to induce them to make use of an international idiom in all their
writings. At the end of a long stru