exceptional beauty are not more numerous, no doubt the average of
comeliness and beauty has been raised.  Thus far, the increase of beauty
due to better development has not been at the expense of delicacy of
complexion and of line, as it has been in some European countries.
Physical well-being is almost entirely a matter of nutrition.  Something
is due in our case to the accumulation of money, to the decrease in an
increasing number of our population of the daily anxiety about food and
clothes, to more leisure; but abundant and better-prepared food is the
direct agency in our physical change.  Good food is not only more
abundant and more widely distributed than it was two generations ago,
but it is to be had in immeasurably greater variety.  No other people
existing, or that ever did exist, could command such a variety of edible
products for daily consumption as the mass of the American people
habitually use today.  In consequence they have the opportunity of being
better nourished than any other people ever were.  If they are not better
nourished, it is because their food is badly prepared.  Whenever we find,
either in New England or in the South, a community ill-favored,
dyspeptic, lean, and faded in complexion, we may be perfectly sure that
its cooking is bad, and that it is too ignorant of the laws of health to
procure that variety of food which is so easily obtainable.  People who