English sailor was forty-two per cent, stronger, and an average
Frenchman thirty per cent, stronger, than the strongest island tribe
they visited. Even in comparing different European races, it is
undeniable that bodily strength goes with the highest civilization.
It is recorded in Robert Stephenson's Life, that, when the English
"navvies" were employed upon the Paris and Boulogne Railway, they used
spades and barrows just twice the size of those employed by their
Continental rivals, and were regularly paid double. Quetelet's
experiments with the dynamometer on university students showed the same
results: first ranked the Englishman, then the Frenchman, then the
Belgian, then the Russian, then the Southern European: for those races
of Southern Europe which once ruled the Eastern and the Western worlds
by physical and mental power have lost in strength as they have paused
in civilization, and the easy victories of our armies in Mexico show us
the result.

It is impossible to deny that the observations on this subject are yet
very imperfect; and the only thing to be claimed is, that they all point
one way. So far as absolute statistical tables go, the above-named
French observations have till recently stood almost alone, and have been
the main reliance. The just criticism has, however, been made, that the
subjects of these experiments were the inhabitants of New Holland and
Van Diemen's Land, by no means the strongest instances on the side of
barbarism. It is, therefore, fortunate that the French tables have now
been superseded by some more important comparisons, accurately made by
A.S. Thomson, M.D., Surgeon of the Fifty-Eighth Regiment of the British
Army, and printed in the seventeenth volume of the Journal of the London
Statistical Society.

The observations were made in New Zealand,--Dr. Thomson being stationed