Side by side with these facts of the statist we detect other facts which show that in the progress of civilisation the actual organic strength and build of the man and woman increases. As in the highest developments of the fine arts the sculptor and painter place before us the finest imaginative types of strength, grace, and beauty, so the silent artist, civilisation, approaches nearer and nearer to perfection, and by evolution of form and mind developes what is practically a new order of physical and mental build. Peron,--who first used, if he did not invent, the little instrument, the dynamometer, or muscular-strength measurer,--subjected persons of different stages of civilisation to the test of his gauge, and discovered that the strength of the limbs of the natives of Van Diemen's Land and New Holland was as 50 degrees of power, while that of the Frenchmen was 69, and of the Englishmen 71. The same order of facts are maintained in respect to the size of body. The stalwart Englishman of to-day can neither get into the armour nor be placed in the sarcophagus of those sons of men who were accounted the heroes of the infantile life of the human world.
We discover, moreover, from our view of the past, that the developments of tenacity of life and of vital power have been comparatively rapid in their course when they have once commenced. There is nothing discoverable to us that would lead to the conception of a human civilisation extending back over two hundred generations; and when in these generations we survey the actual effect of civilisation, so fragmentary and overshadowed by persistent barbarism, in influencing disease and mortality, we are reduced to the observation of at most twelve generations, including our own, engaged, indirectly or directly, in the work of sanitary progress. During this comparatively brief period, the labour of which, until within a century, has had no systematic direction, the changes for good that have been effected are amongst the most startling of historical facts. Pestilences which decimated populations, and which, like the great plague of London, destroyed 7,165 people in a single week, have lost their virulency; gaol fever has disappeared, and our gaols, once each a plague-spot, have become, by a strange perversion of civilisation, the health spots of, at least, one kingdom. The term, Black Death, is heard no more; and ague, from which the London physician once made a fortune, is now a rare tax even on the skill of the hardworked Union Medical Officer.