1880.] English and A merican Physique . 107 
whole life, and concentrated more activity in a certain 
period of time than any other people, has been the faith of 
all travellers, and this belief has a foundation of reality; 
but in Europe at least, and to a less degree in Continental 
Europe, we now observe the same eagerness, intensity, 
feverishness, and nervousness that have hitherto been sup- 
posed to be peculiarly American. 
Particularly was I amazed by this when I was in Cork 
during the present year, attending a meeting of the British 
Medical Association. The labour of a month was com- 
pressed into a week. Every one was in haste — officers and 
members having only bits of time to breathe or speak ; a 
procession of suppers, breakfasts, balls, banquets, scientific 
orations, garden-parties, and excursions at every point of 
the compass, crowded so closely as to tread upon each 
other’s heels ; after such a vacation one needed a vacation. 
At no gathering outside of political assemblages in America 
have I seen such excitement, such hurryings, such impa- 
tience, such evidences of imminent responsibility as among 
the leaders and officers of that meeting. 
This Americanisation of Europe would seem to be the 
complex resultant of a variety of influences — the increase of 
travel and trade, and concentration, and intensifying of 
activity required by the telegraph, railway, and printing- 
press — the endosmosis and exosmosis of international life — 
a reciprocity of character. It is clear that even in Europe 
each generation becomes on the whole rather more sensitive 
than its predecessor, and in this pathological process even 
Germany shares ; Switzerland, perhaps, being less affedbed 
up to the present time than almost any other part of Central 
Europe. 
The nervousness of the third generation of Germans is a 
fadb that comes to my professional notice more and more. 
Men whose parents on both sides were born in Germany, 
here develop the American type in all its details — chiselled 
features, great fineness and silkiness of the hair, delicacy of 
skin, and tapering extremities. Such persons have con- 
sulted me for all phases and stages of fundbional nervous 
trouble. Indeed, I have seen in my professional experience 
no more severe examples of nervous suffering than in this 
class. Englishmen, even those who were born in England, 
develop either in their own country, or in this, the land of 
their adoption, many of the prominent symptoms of func- 
tional nervous diseases that are supposed to be especially 
and pre-eminently American. I am told by one of the 
leaders of German science, Professor Erb, of Heidelberg, 
