average weight was a hundred and fifty-one
pounds, or ten stones eleven pounds. This
tells a good tale of the batsmen and oarsmen
of the Cam; for Frenchmen and Belgians of
those ages would not reach quite to such an
average. Factory life lessens the weight below
the level of open-air life. A few years back,
Mr. Cowell caused fifteen hundred children
and young persons in Manchester and Stockport,
some employed in cotton factories,
and some leading an out-of-door life, to be
weighed; he found that, at the age of eighteen,
the average weights were as follows; factory
youths, a hundred and six pounds; out-door
youths, a hundred and twenty-six pounds;
factory girls, a hundred and six pounds; out-
door girls, a hundred and twenty-one pounds.
This seems to denote that youths are relatively
more stunted than girls by factory life.
Professor J. D. Forbes, availing himself of the
facilities afforded by his scientific position at
Edinburgh, weighed no fewer than eight hundred
youths and young men who attended the
University in that city. He divided them into
nationalities and into ages; he found that at fifteen
years old, the average for each of the three
kingdoms was about a hundred and fourteen pounds;
and that at the age of twenty-five, the Englishmen
averaged a hundred and fifty-one pounds, the
Scotchmen a hundred and fifty-two, and the Irishmen
a hundred and fifty-five. The Belgian average
for that age is about a hundred and fifty pounds,
and the French average a few pounds less.

Let us say, then, that a full-grown man in
Western Europe averages about eleven stones
(a hundred and fifty-four pounds) in weight,
at thirty or thirty-five years of age. We
cannot be far wrong in this, and it will serve
us as a standard of comparison for estimating
the fleshy virtues of notably fat people.
We say fleshy in a popular sense, leaving to
physiologists to determine how much is flesh
and how much fat, in a bulky person.

It is observable that very thin people do not
announce their thinness abroad. We speak,
truth to tell, somewhat contemptuously of them.
We call such a man Lanky Laurence, or Pill
Garlic, or Thread-paper, or Skin-and-Grief,
or Bodkin, or Lath. Scarcely any man, except
the Living Skeleton, ever exhibited himself
on account of his thinness. What a poor
object that same Claude Ambrose Seurat was!
Born at Troyes in 1798, he was a baby of
ordinary size, but began gradually to waste,
until, at the age of twenty-one, he had less flesh
and fat upon him than any full-grown person ever
known. At the age of twenty-seven he was
exhibited in London as the Living Skeleton.
Anatomists and medical men were greatly
interested in him; other spectators were shocked.
The circumference of his arm was only five
inches and a half at the largest part, and of his
waist twenty-three inches below the ribs; his
muscles were too weak to enable him to hold
out his arms horizontally; and his attempts at
walking were like those of a person whose "foot
is asleep;" his skin was like dry parchment,
and his ribs were as clearly defined as a bundle
of canes. Thin people, we have said, seldom
exhibit on account of their thinness, though
many have done so for their stoutness. It is
those who grow largely in excess, and not those
who lag far behind the average of eleven stones,
who claim for themselves a place in history.

M. Laurent notices a Parisian boy who must
have frightened his parents a little, for he
weighed a hundred and four pounds at four years
old. There was a boy at Winlaton, in Durham,
about a century ago, who, at the age of ten
years, measured thirteen inches round the thigh,
and thirty-three round the waist; he was a
queer fellow in other ways, for he had six toes
on each foot, and six fingers on one hand. In
1784 died an Irish gentleman, Mr. Lovelace
Love, from very fatness. So immense was his
bulk, that his coffin is said to have measured seven
feet in length, four in breadth, and three and a
half in depth (though we doubt these figures);
how many pounds of flesh he could have
furnished to Shylock is not narrated. Mr.
Baker, who died at Worcester in 1766, was so
large a man that, in the language of the local
prints, "his coffin measured seven feet over, and
was bigger than an ordinary hearse, and part of
the wall was obliged to be taken down to admit
its passage." Six years afterwards there died
at Usk, in Monmouthshire, one Mr. Philip
Mason, whose dimensions were recorded as
follows; round the wrist, eleven inches; round
the upper arm, twenty-one inches; round the
chest, sixty inches; round the largest part of
the body, seventy-two inches; round the thigh,
thirty-seven inches; round the calf of the leg,
twenty-five inches. In the Dictionnaire des
Sciences Médicales, an account is given of a
French woman, Marie Françoise Clay, who
attained an enormous bulk before her death, in
1806. Married at the age of twenty-five, she
had six children, and became fatter and fatter
every year she lived, though plunged in deep
poverty. It was not good living that made her
fat. She measured sixty-two inches round the
body; neck she had none, for her small head
sank down between two enormous shoulders. At
night she had to sleep nearly upright, to avoid
suffocation. Her day was spent at a church
porch in Paris, where she sat to excite pity, and
draw forth charity by her fatness and rags.

The above instances are wanting in facilities
for comparison, on account of the actual
weights being, in most cases, unrecorded. We
will, therefore, dive into old newspapers and
registers, for instances more specifically definite
on this point. "Died lately" (so said a
newspaper a century old this year), "Mrs. Harris,
opposite St. Anne's Church, Soho, weighing
three hundred and twenty pounds." Poor
Mrs. Harris! her weight was a little more
than double that (eleven stones) which we
find to be the average of middle-aged full-
grown men. There was a Kentish farmer
and innkeeper, one Mr. Palmer, who attracted
much attention in the early part of the present
century by his enormous bulk. He weighed