PHYSICAL DEGENERACY.

 THE 'Spectator' strongly combats the theory that civilization has produced any physical deterioration in the Anglo-saxon or Anglo-celtic races. In the article we refer to the following passages occur :—

 "If there is one fact certain in the history of the world, it is that the notion of the physical degeneration of the human race which pervades all literatures, has infected all creeds, and has been embodied in almost all histories, rests upon no evidence whatever. Abraham would not be more noticed in Syria for his size than any Sheik who traces to him his ancestry. There is no record worthy a moment's attention of any race who, if stripped and disarmed and put opposite an equal number of English navvies equally stripped and disarmed, would not in ten minutes be smashed into indistinguishable jelly. The earliest pictures we possess of human beings, those on the Egyptian monuments, display a people slighter, shorter, and with altogether less of all the constituents which make up healthy weight than the English of to-day. Greek statues, when intended to be life-size, are the simulacra, as far as weight goes, of Greek men and women as we see them now. The soldier of Pharaoh was very like a Sikh ; and a Greek athlete would have recognised his own type in Leotard, the trapeze performer. The notion that civilisation weakens is just as baseless. An average New Zealander or Kaffir is about the equal of an average Englishman, and no other savage is even that. Most savages would be as hopelessly beaten in a naked contest with an Englishman trained to their work as an untrained Englishman would be by a Westmoreland wrestler, and a very large proportion of them are greatly inferior to any western men, could not enter into any physical contest with them with any hope of victory. The most perfect savage of mankind, the Veddah or the Andamanese, would be strangled by a London costermonger in three minutes ; and the Red Indian warrior in the highest condition is, apart altogether, from the differences created by civilisation, wholly unable to encounter the Kentuckian. The Kentuckian can crush his ribs at the first hug. We believe that the whole of the popular theory of deterioration in cities is originally the protest of the boor against the superiority of the citizen, whom he pretends to despise because he is pale, but who can, and does do double his work ; who can outrun him, outleap him, and out-talk him, and if he happens to turn poacher, defeat him in open fight. A London rough may be, and very often is, an obscene brute; but he will give any country-man in England, not being a Celt, two stone, and then ' thrash his head off.' Whom is it that he as a mere animal has degenerated from the knight whose armour is three inches too short for him, or the yeoman whose bow he can wield as easily as at Agincourt?'

Gundagai Times and Tumut, Adelong and Murrumbidgee District Advertiser (NSW : 1868 - 1931), Saturday 2 December 1871, page 4