there with his regiment, and being charged with the duty of vaccinating
all natives employed by the government. The islanders thus used for
experiment were to some extent picked men, as none but able-bodied
persons would have been selected for employ, and as they were, moreover,
(he states,) accustomed to lifting burdens, and better-fed than the
majority of their countrymen. The New Zealand race, as a whole, is
certainly a very favorable type of barbarism, having but just emerged
from an utterly savage condition, having been cannibals within one
generation, and being the very identical people among whom were recorded
those wonderful cures of flesh-wounds to which Emerson has referred.
Cook and all other navigators have praised their robust physical aspect,
and they undoubtedly, with the Fijians and the Tongans, stand at the
head of all island races. They are admitted to surpass our American
Indians, as well as the Kaffirs and the Joloffs, probably the finest
African races; and a careful comparison between New-Zealanders and
Anglo-Saxons will, therefore, approach as near to an _experimentum
crucis_ as any single set of observations can. The following tables have
been carefully prepared from those of Dr. Thomson, with the addition
of some scanty facts from other sources,--scanty, because, as Quetelet
indignantly observes, less pains have as yet been taken to measure
accurately the physical powers of man than those of any machine he has
constructed or any animal he has tamed.

TABLE.

HEIGHT. _Number measured. Average._
New-Zealanders................... 147 5 feet 6-3/4 inches.
Students at Edinburgh............ 800 5 " 7-1/10 "
Class of 1860. Cambridge (Mass.). 106 5 " 7-3/5 "
Students at Cambridge (Eng.)..... 80 5 " 8-3/5 "