its will satisfy any one that
they laced more tightly than their descendants, and wore their dresses
lower in the neck; and as for their diet, we have the testimony of another
French traveller, Volney, who was in America from 1795 to 1798, that "if
a premium were offered for a regimen most destructive to the teeth, the
stomach, and the health in general, none could be devised more efficacious
for these ends than that in use among this people." And he goes on to give
particulars, showing a far worse condition in respect to cookery and diet
than now prevails in any decent American society.

We have therefore strong evidence that the essential change in the American
type was effected in the last century, not in this. Dr. E.H. Clarke says,
"A century does not afford a period long enough for the production of great
changes. That length of time could not transform the sturdy German
_fraeulein_ and robust English damsel into the fragile American miss." And
yet it is pretty clear that the first century and a half of our colonial
life had done just this for our grandmothers. And, if so, our physiologists
ought to conform their theories to the facts.

THE PHYSIQUE OF AMERICAN WOMEN

I was talking the other day with a New York physician, long retired from
practice, who after an absence of a dozen years in Europe has returned
within a year to this country. He volunteered the remark, that nothing had
so impressed him since his return as the improved health of Americans. He
said that his wife had been equally struck with it; and that they had
noticed it especially among the inhabitants of cities, among the more
cultivated classes, and in particular among women.

It so happened, that within twenty-four hours almost precisely the same
remark was made to me by another gentleman of unusually cosmopolitan
experience, and past middle age. He further fortified himself by a similar
assertion made him by Charles Dickens, in comparing his second visit to
this country with his first. In answer to an inquiry as to what points of
difference had most impressed him, Dickens said, "Your people, especially
the women, look better fed than formerly."

It is possible that in all these cases the witnesses may have been led to
exaggerate the original evil, while absent from the country, and so may
have felt some undue reaction on their arrival. One of my informants went
so far as to express confidence that among his circle of friends in Boston