Is the diseased taste for monsters and monstrosities Anglo- Saxon
mainly, or common to the vulgarer feelings of all mankind ? Certainly, no people can be more vacantly amused and vulgarly curious about disproportions in the shape of dwarfs and giants, men with three legs, or four thumbs, or two heads, or whatever it may be, than English and Americans. Here are our cousins, the Yankees in Connecticut, summoning competitors in fat to meet, be weighed, and otherwise exhibit to the world their unfortunate bulk. One hundred and seventeen men, weighing between 14 and 26 stone, attended,—the heaviest of them weighing 3581b., or 25 stone 81b. Those who weighed under 2001b. were expected to eat themselves up to that weight before entering on the com- petition, and five men who were some pounds under that weight before eating, are said to have stuffed enough heavy material into their bodies to enable them to exceed it. After the honours' lists in weight were made out—which was accomplished with an ordin- ary pair of scales—the fat men played leap-frog, and when one fat man cleared the back of another fat man there was great waving of handkerchiefs and other signs of sweet feminine enthusiasm. It was a disgusting sort of amusement. As if it were not calamity enough to be laden for life with superfluous hundredweights of adhesive cellular tissue, without drawing attention to it, and snaking it the subject of a tasteless and barbarous jocosity !
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