Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/120

110 in Massachusetts with one in Yorkshire, and what Mr. Young says of American women lacking or losing form and beauty is more true of the English example than the American. There are numbers of English women, it is true, who show the type, at one extreme, to which Mr. Young refers, but as you go from that extreme to the other you find the middle type as much the rule in England as in America, and the worn, thin, nervous type fully as common in England as in America, and often more extreme here than in America. It is life more than climate which produces this extreme, and life for Englishwomen is worse than American in the whole lower range of society, and in many sections higher up.

It is quite erroneous for Mr. Young to talk of the drying, irritating effect of American climate as compared with English. The drying, irritating, corrosive effect of the east wind in the streets of London is very much worse than anything known in America. It is a strong, steady Siberian wind, which blows for weeks together, with a biting power which I have seen entirely blacken the early leaves of the horse chestnut. In many seasons, judging by what I have seen myself, and by many statements made by English writers, I should say that, in bad seasons at least, the irritating effects of the English climate are more than twice as bad as those of the American. At any rate, there is no ground whatever for saying that American women are made thin and English are not. More English women than American are made very thin by the greater cruelty to women of English care and toil and suffering. And, if more are kept stout, it is largely because the stout type have stuck to the home soil, and very largely because of beer added to beef.

Mr. Young's conclusion as to America, that "the dry air produces nervous, energetic, large-jointed skeletons, which have little or nothing in common with the stout, fresh, rosy, phlegmatic inhabitants of the mother-country," could not well be more wide of the mark. The type which Mr. Young says is American was produced hundreds of generations ago; and if Mr. Young chooses he can see in the north of England a larger proportion of this type than he can find anywhere in America, except those parts of the South where English and Scotch of this type were numerous in the early colonies. Typical skeletons are not made in a day, nor in seven or eight generations. I should say that, across England by Manchester and Sheffield, the "nervous, energetic, large jointed," not stout, not rosy, and most emphatically not phlegmatic men, are ten to one as numerous as anywhere in America. One supposes that he has seen nervous energy in Chicago, but only in England have I ever had my attention drawn to nervous energy almost gone mad. The impression that the English are phlegmatic is a false inference from peculiar appearances.

The exterior calm is very often that of suppressed temper, and the outbreak of violent temper is very much worse and much more