graphy. The differentiation of
the physical characteristics of our branch of the English race is
admittedly due, in part, to climate. In spite of the immense range of
climatic variations as one passes from New England to New Orleans, from
the Mississippi Valley to the high plains of the Far West, or from the
rainy Oregon belt southward to San Diego, the settlers of English stock
find a prevalent atmospheric condition, as a result of which they
begin, in a generation or two, to change in physique. They grow thinner
and more nervous, they "lean forward," as has been admirably said of
them, while the Englishman "leans back"; they are less heavy and less
steady; their voices are higher, sharper; their athletes get more
easily "on edge"; they respond, in short, to an excessively
stimulating climate. An old-fashioned sea-captain put it all into a
sentence when he said that he could drink a bottle of wine with his
dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle in New York. Explain the
cause as we may, the fact seems to be that the body of John Bull
changes, in the United States, into the body of Uncle Sam.

There are mental differences no less pronounced. No adjective has been
more frequently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the word "dull." The
American mind has been accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity,
commonplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but "dulness" is not one
of them. "Smartness," rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation;
or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is the word
"cleverness," used with that lurking contempt for cleverness which is
truly English and which long survived in the dialect of New England,
where the village ne'er-do-well or Jack-of-all-trades used to be
pronounced a "clever" fellow. The variety of employments to which the
American pioneers were obliged to betake themselves has done something,
no doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick assimilation of
new methods and notions, a ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An
invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity; the settler in a new country,
like Moses in the wilderness of Arabia, must "turn aside to see"; he
must look into things, learn to read signs,--or else the Indians or
frost or freshet will soon put an end to his pioneering. That curiosity
concerning strangers which so much irritated Dickens and Mrs. Trollope
was natural to the children of Western emigrants to whom the difference
between Sioux and Pawnee ha