s are generally
regular; their complexions are generally fair and without color....
At twenty years of age the women have no longer the freshness of
youth. At thirty-five or forty they are wrinkled and decrepit. The
men are almost as premature."

Again: The Chevalier Louis Felix de Beaujour lived in the United States
from 1804 to 1814, as consul-general and _charge d'affaires;_ and wrote a
book, immediately after, which was translated into English under the title,
"A Sketch of the United States at the Commencement of the Present Century."
In this he thus describes American women:--

"The women have more of that delicate beauty which belongs to their
sex, and in general have finer features and more expression in their
physiognomy. Their stature is usually tall, and nearly all are
possessed of a light and airy shape,--the breast high, a fine head,
and their color of a dazzling whiteness. Let us imagine, under this
brilliant form, the most modest demeanor, a chaste and virginal air,
accompanied by those single and unaffected graces which flow from
artless nature, and we may have an idea of their beauty; but this
beauty fades and passes in a moment. At the age of twenty-five their
form changes, and at thirty the whole of their charms have
disappeared."

These statements bring out a class of facts, which, as it seems to me, are
singularly ignored by some of our physiologists. They indicate that the
modification of the American type began early, and was, as a rule, due to
causes antedating the fashions or studies of the present day. Here are our
grandmothers and great-grandmothers as they were actually seen by the eyes
of impartial or even flattering critics. These critics were not Englishmen,
accustomed to a robust and ruddy type of women, but Frenchmen, used to a
type more like the American. They were not mere hasty travellers; for the
one lived here ten years, and the other was stationed for some time at
Newport, R.I., in a healthy locality, noted in those days for the beauty
of its women. Yet we find it their verdict upon these grandmothers of
nearly a hundred years ago, that they showed the same delicate beauty, the
same slenderness, the same pallor, the same fragility, the same early
decline, with which their granddaughters are now reproached.

In some respects, probably, the physical habits of the grandmothers were
better: but an examination of their portra