DOES THE HUMAN RACE DEGENERATE?

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 2145, 18 November 1875, Page 4

DOES THE HUMAN RACE DEGENERATE?

■-Apropos of the wonderful feat of Captain Webb in swimming across the English Channel, tho Spectator says :— There never was a delusion with less evidence for it—except a permanent impression among mankind, which is often the result, not of accumulated experience, but of an ever-renewing discontent with the actual state of things—than that most delusive of all delusions —the alleged dogeneratiGn of man. There is not the slightest evidence anywhere that man was a bigger, stronger, swifter, or more enduring under the same conditions of food and climate than he is now. As to bigness, the evidence is positive. Modern Egyptians are as big as the mummies who were conquerors in their day, and modern Englishmen are bigger. There are not in existence a thousand coats of armour which an English regiment could put on. Very few moderns can use ancient swords, because the hilts are too small for their hands. Endless wealth and skill were expended in picking gladiators, and there is no evidence that a man among them was as big or as strong as Shaw. No skeleton, no statue, no picture indicates that men in general were ever bigger. The Jews of to-day are as large as they were in Egypt, or larger. The people of the Romagna have all the bearing and more than the size of the Roman soldiery. No feat is recorded as usual with Greek athletes which English acrobats could not perform now. There is no naked savage tribe which naked Cornishmen or Yorkshiremen could not strangle. No race exists of which a thousand N men similarly armed would defeat an English, or German, or Russian regiment of equal numbers. Nothing is recorded of our forefathers here in England which Englishmen could not do, unless it be some feats of archery, which were the result of a long training of the eye continued for generations. The most civilised and luxurious family that ever existed, the European royal caste, is physically as big, as healthy, and as powerful as any people of whom we have any account tha.t science can accept. Thiers' Frenchman, is Caesar's Gaul in all bodily conditions, and with an increased power of keeping alive, which may be partly owing to improved conditions of living, but is probably owing still more to developed vitality. Physical condition depends on physical conditions, and why should a race better fed, better clothed, and better housed than it ever was before degenerate ? The conditions of civilization not only do not prohibit Captain Webb, who would have out-walked out-swum, or strangled any German that Tacitus ever romanced about, but they enable him to live to 70 instead of dying at 45, as 2,000 years ago he, then probably a slave bred for the arena, would have done. Of physical degeneracy without change of food or climate we can find no authentic trace. The illusion is a mere result of discontent, and of inability to see facts through the mist in which time kindly enshrouds them. That the human race, even under flhe best conditions, advances very little in physical capacities is true, but then it is true also that these conditions are fatal to the most powerful of the old improving forces, the survival of the fittest. Still an advance is perceptible in vital power, and we question whether a Greek swimmer would ever have crossed from Dover to Calais, just as strongly as we question whether the ancient world ever possessed a horse which would have achieved a place at Epsom. Why should men grow feeble in civilisation any more than horses ?