The truth seems to be, that Nature is endeavoring to take a new departure
in the American, and to produce a race more finely organized, more
sensitive, more pliable, and of more nervous energy, than the races of
Northern Europe; that this change of type involves some risk to health in
the process, but promises greater results whenever the new type shall be
established. I am confident that there has been within the last
half-century a great improvement in the physical habits of the more
cultivated classes, at least, in this country,--better food, better air,
better habits as to bathing and exercise. The great increase of athletic
games; the greatly increased proportion of seaside and mountain life in
summer; the thicker shoes and boots of women and little girls, permitting
them to go out more freely in all weathers,--these are among the permanent
gains. The increased habit of dining late, and of taking only a lunch at
noon, is of itself an enormous gain to the professional and mercantile
classes, because it secures time for eating and for digestion. Even the
furnaces in houses, which seemed at first so destructive to the very breath
of life, turn out to have given a new lease to it; and open fires are being
rapidly reintroduced as a provision for enjoyment and health, when the main
body of the house has been tempered by the furnace. There has been,
furthermore, a decided improvement in the bread of the community, and a
very general introduction of other farinaceous food. All this has happened
within my own memory, and gives _a priori_ probability to the alleged
improvement in physical condition within twenty years.

And, if these reasonings are still insufficient on the one side, it must be
remembered that the facts of the census are almost equally inadequate when
quoted on the other. If, for instance, all the young people of a New
Hampshire village take a fancy to remove to Wisconsin, it does not show
that the race is dying out because their children swell the birth-rate of