The St. Johns herald., 1892-08-25
GROWING IN GiR'TH.
Why It Is That Americans Are
 Becoming 6touSer.
Original Types of Phys:aue Passing Away = Beer Dr.axiu= said to Ee Ees2oI2s:.;ie for t;:e
 iyi.z-.~-a.


 Recently . writer ia tl;e Roato7 Tran. l script stated oa tl:c Guti2crity of his s2ilor, or perhaps 2 number of tailors
 that the s0atheraers- supposed to mean
 southern men--are growing bigger
 around the waist. Tkis increase of girth was declared to be.'cn an average,
 m inch and a half, and it was set down
 IS an evidence Of Increasing prosperity ! among the southern people.
 The subject as denoting a distinct physiological change in tho corporeal stat1Ee Of the southern people is worth study. says the New Orleans Picayune.
 [f such change hcs taken place it must be attributed to 3eer, not to any ca1se spiritual or moral.
 The original type Of the American physique is 9 body tall, slender and lean. There is an absence of fat, the bone and the brawn alone being strongly developed. This is the type of the American Indian, and it was the type to which the white race in Amer ica rapidly conformed. The first set tiers of the states, from New England to Florida, were of the English type English, Scotch and Irish.
 Sc far from being of a slender figure, those people were stout and portly, like the English of to-day. They came to the new world with the bodies which the physical forces and influences there had made for them, but when those bodies began to be operated on by the forces and influences which they encountered here the immigrants sue cumbed to the natural law and began to take on the type of the men of the new world.
 In the course of 9 couple of centuries the descendants of the English and Dutch and German immigrants had be- come lean. slim and bony. It was the type of the men all the way from New England to Georgia. The prevailing caricatures of "Uncle San," of the Yankee and the southerner always rep resented them as tall, thin and gaunt, but always vigorous and muscular. The Americans are said to be the most nervous people in the world, except the American Indians and the Arabs. These physical and physiological conditions must be attributed to the dryness of the American climate. Our climate is unduly dry, except on the Pacific coast.
 The revolution of the planet on which we live to the eastward carries with it the vast mass of the surrounding att mosphere. The lofty ranges of noun tains along the western coast of all the land in our hemisphere cuts off the moisture from the Pacific ocean and causes it to fall on the Pacific slope lands and pour back into that sea, while the vast interior of the continent is left dry, much of it being arid deserts. This eastward drift of air brings with it no moisture, and but for the gulf of Mexico, which penetrates so far into the continent, the greater part of the country west of the Mississippi river would be uninhabitable. On the con- trary, this eastward drift of tse atmos- pherc carries vast loads of moisture to Europe, and so that continent far upon the confines of Asia has more moist climate than that of America.
 The physiologists have rightly att tributed the leanness of the Americans, aboriginal and assimilated, to this eX- cessive dryness. Now, within half century, the introduction and rapid diffusion and increase in the use of beer as Q beverage has begun to work a remarkable change. As far as the human form is concerned it is equiva- lent to making the climate less dry. Under it's influence the people arc get ting stouter. New Orleans is the cen ter of an extensive manufacture and distribution of beer, and the beverage is made and consumed in all parts of the south, where its use is as much the rule as in the west. No wonder the are growing in girth.
 This is the simple truth of the mat ter. The American people are becom- ing stout, and beer is the cause Of it.