248 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



measuring 120 newborn infants of both sexes he found that there 

 was a marked tendency for the males to be larger than the females. 

 'Hence appears/ as he is pleased to put it, 'the merciful dispensations 

 of Providence towards the female sex, for when deviations from the 

 medium standard occur it is remarkable that they are much more 

 frequently below than above this standard.' He considered that the 

 greater mortality of males at and shortly after birth is largely due 

 to the injuries to the head occurring at birth, but also that, since 

 the males are larger and therefore make from the first a larger demand 

 on the nutritive capacity of the mother, they are more likely to suffer 

 from any defect of the mother in this respect. The problem and its 

 possible and probable explanations were thus clearly stated more than 

 a century ago. 



As often happens with pioneers, Clarke's little paper was for- 

 gotten, and for more than half a century, although a number of 

 workers brought extensive contributions of new data, their attitude 

 was frequently illogical or one-sided, and the progress of scientific 

 knowledge was not great. In 1844 Simpson published a well-known 

 study which brought together a mass of evidence bearing more or 

 less on the question before us. He showed that in male births the 

 mothers suffered excessively as well as the infants; he refused to admit 

 that the greater mortality of males at and shortly after birth could be 

 due to any other cause than the generally recognized larger size of 

 the male head (mainly on the ground that foetal deaths up to birth 

 are fairly apportioned to the two sexes) and concluded that the 

 greater size of the male head is the cause of a vast annual mortality. 

 A number of later obstetrical inquirers furnished additional con- 

 tributions to the matter, at one point or another, though not always 

 agreeing that so great a mortality could be due to a difference of 

 size which seemed so small. One authority, indeed, roundly declared 

 that the belief in the larger size of the male head was merely 'a pop- 

 ular prejudice'; this led to fresh measurements, and in this field Stadt- 

 feldt of Copenhagen received credit which really belonged to Clarke 

 of Dublin. Veit showed that even at equal weights more boys than 

 girls die at birth, but, on the other hand, according to Pfannkuch's 

 results, even at equal weights boys' heads are larger than girls'. In 

 any case it certainly seemed probable that the larger size of the male 

 child's head was an important factor in this mortality, and when at 

 length the question began to attract the attention of statistical anthro- 

 pologists this conclusion was confirmed. The Anthropometric Com- 

 mittee of the British Association, presided over by Mr. Francis Galton, 

 in its final report in 1883 stated its belief that "it would appear that 

 the physical (and most probably the mental) proportions of a race, 

 and their uniformity within certain limits, are largely dependent on 



