But the Roman soldier generally prevailed against races whom he excelled in size, weight, and muscular strength. His superiority in arms, like that of the Greek, was not conspicuous when he came into contact with the ‘barbarians,’[934] especially with the northern barbarians, after they had learned the moral training and confidence of discipline and the practical art of war, as well as, if not better than, himself. For the man of the higher European latitudes has ever surpassed the Southron in strength of constitution, in stature, in weight, in muscular power, and in the mysterious something called vitality. Hence it is a rule in anthropology that the North beats the South; in the Southern hemisphere the reverse being the case, as we see in the wars of the Hispano-American republics, Chili _versus_ Peru. In Europe I need only point out that the Northmen of Scandinavia conquered Normandy and that Norman-French conquered England. The only exceptions are easily explained. The genius of Divus Cæsar made his Romans overcome, overrun, and subjugate Gaul. Napoleon the Great found the road _à Berlin_ open and easy. But intellectual monsters like these two are the rare produce of Time; and human nature requires a long period of rest before repeating such portents. Those who read history without prepossessions and prejudices are compelled to conclude that the life and career of a nation are mainly determined by its physical size and its muscular strength. We have only to learn how many foot-pounds a race can raise and we can forecast its so-called ‘destinies.’[935] CHAPTER XIII. THE SWORD AMONGST THE BARBARIANS (EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE). Most works on Arms and Armour, when treating of Rome, describe the weapons of her European neighbours ‘upon whom she sharpened the sword of her valour as on a whetstone.’[936] The extent of the subject will here confine me to a general glance, beginning with the Dacians on the east and ending with the British Islands. I must reserve details concerning the Kelts, the Scandinavians, the Slavs, and other northern peoples for Part II., to which they chronologically belong. The Dacians, especially of Dacia Trajana, Hungary, and Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia, are known to us chiefly by the bas-reliefs on the Trajan Column. It was built by that emperor, who, like Hadrian, followed in the footsteps of Divus Cæsar, to commemorate the conquests of A.D. 103–104; and it dates three years before his death in A.D. 114. The Dacian Sword was somewhat sickle-shaped, with an inner edge, like the oldest Greek and its model, the Egyptian Khopsh. A Dacian Sword on the trophy belonging to Dr. Gregorutti, of Papiriano, is a curved sabre without a cross-bar.