Science Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

A sore body becomes a measuring instrument here, and Tylor uses it to smuggle in a whole worldview. The line lands with the dry satisfaction of someone who has survived an ordeal and is now allowed the petty luxury of declaring a winner in the contest of misery: no road can be worse than a Mexican road. The joke is structured like an empirical finding, complete with revision of a hypothesis ("Mr. Christy withdrew his claims") and later replication ("later experiences... confirm"). That pseudo-scientific cadence is the point. It lets a travel gripe masquerade as objective truth.

But the subtext is doing heavier work than comedy. In the 19th-century British imagination, infrastructure stood in for civilization itself. Roads weren’t just roads; they were moral proof. By turning Mexico into a punchline about impassable paths, Tylor taps a familiar imperial reflex: to read difficulty as deficiency, and local conditions as national character. The phrasing "a Mexican road" isn’t descriptive so much as categorical, a stereotype with wheels.

Context matters: Tylor is writing from the posture of the traveling observer who will later help formalize anthropology. His wit functions as social positioning. The ache signals authenticity ("we were there, we suffered"), while the sweeping verdict asserts authority. It’s a small sentence that models a larger habit of the era: turning subjective inconvenience into a generalized judgment about a place, then calling it evidence.