'Well, upon my word, Mrs. Primrose, you have the handsomest children in the whole country.' 'Ah! neighbor,' replied the wife of the Vicar of Wakefield, 'they are as heaven made them—handsome enough if they be good enough—handsome is that handsome does.'
IS THE RACE DEGENERATING?
This is a question which perplexes some minds in our times. A German author of note has recently written a volume to prove that each generation is feebler than the preceding. Old physicians say that in their youth diseases of exhaustion were rarer than now-a-days. For this our habits of life, the pressure on our nervous systems, the prevalence of hereditary diseases, and the excessive use of narcotics and stimulants, are held responsible. 'The fathers,' say these croakers, 'have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.'
We attach little weight to these gloomy views. There are plenty of facts on the other side. The suits of old armour still preserved in our museums prove that, as a rule, we have slightly gained in weight and size. Tables of life insurance companies and reports of statistics show that the average length of human life is greater than it ever was. Dr. Charles D. Meigs used to state in his lectures that the size of the head of American infants at birth is somewhat greater than in the Old World.
That there are more numerous diseases than formerly, is not true; but it is true that we know more, for we have learned to detect them more readily and to examine them more minutely. This is especially true of such as are peculiar to women. Within the last ten or twenty years so much that is of sovereign importance has been contributed to this department of medical science, that it is hardly possible for one to become an expert in it unless he gives it his whole attention.
To avoid the tendency to debilitated frames and chronic diseases, woman should therefore learn not only the laws of her own physical life, but the relations in which she stands to the other sex. Thus she can guard her own health, and preserve her offspring from degeneracy. It is only by enlightenment, and the extension of knowledge on the topics relating to soundness of body and mind, that we can found rational hopes of a permanent and wide-spread improvement of the race.
Some have maintained, not understanding the bearing of the facts, that such degeneracy is more conspicuous in the frame of woman than anywhere else. They quote the narratives of travellers, who describe with what fortitude—we might almost say with what indifference—the Indian women, and those of other savage races, bear the pangs of childbirth, and how little the ordeal weakens them. A squaw will turn aside for an hour or two when on the march, bear a child, wash it in some stream, bind it on the top of her load, and shouldering both, quietly rejoin the vagrant troop. Our artificial life seems indeed, in this respect, to be to blame; but if we look closer, we can learn that these wild women often perish alone, that they are rarely fertile, that unnatural labors are not unknown, and that the average duration of their life is decidedly less than among the females in civilised States.