THEIR HEIGHT, FORM, AND STRENGTH. 27 



ages for the suffering and debasement that past 

 generations have endured in perfecting its appalling 

 lesson in the persons of their descendants. It is not 

 necessary to travel out of Dublin to study in this 

 school. From June till August our quays are a 

 commodious class-room. A hundred professors of 

 spare diet may here be found any day in the week, 

 giving ocular demonstration of the effects of famine 

 on the human frame and visage. Five feet two 

 upon an average, pot-bellied, bow-legged, abortively 

 featured . . . these spectres of a people that 

 once were well grown, ablebodied, and comely, stalk 

 abroad into the daylight of civilization, to fright 

 the Sister Island with annual apparitions of Irish 

 ugliness and Irish want." 



(6.) This picture, as calumnious as it is graphic 

 and forcible, had an extraordinary success. As Dr. 

 Beddoe says,* " it has been quoted by every mono- 

 genist writer at home and abroad ever since." He 

 might have added that it has been quoted by every 

 polygenist writer also. Dr. Hall cites it in his in- 

 troduction to Pickering's Natural History of Man. 



(7.) A distinguished Frenchman, Breau de Quatre- 

 fages, quotes it from Hall, and comments on it 



* Races of Britain, pp. 27, 142, 298, 266, and vol. iii. of 

 Memoirs of the Anthropological Society, p. 569, et seq. I don't 

 know now the precise page. 



