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 portraits 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
_fräulein_ 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.