CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



The purpose'of this volume is to present the results of a first attempt 

 to analyze the data of basal metabolism in normal men and women by 

 the higher statistical or biometric formulas. 



^- These methods, associated primarily with the names of Sir Francis 

 Galton and Professor Karl Pearson, are steadily making their way in 

 the most varied fields of biological work. While Pearson and his 

 associates at the Biometric Laboratory and the Galton Laboratory for 

 National Eugenics, University College, London, have touched on vari- 

 ous problems of interest to physiologists in their studies of inheritance 

 and of environmental influence, the methods have, up to the present 

 time, been little employed in the domain of human physiology. Per- 

 haps the most important papers in their bearing upon the problems 

 with which we are here concerned are those by Bell, 1 by Whiting, 2 and 

 by Williams, Bell and Pearson 3 on oral temperature in school children. 

 Valuable as such studies unquestionably are from the standpoint of 

 social and general biological science, statistical constants based on the 

 returns of the public-school medical officer or of the prison surgeon can 

 not be considered adequate for the requirements of modern nutritional 

 physiology, in which measurements of a high degree of accuracy and 

 made under carefully controlled conditions are indispensable. 



Both the unfamiliarity of the biometric methods to most physiolo- 

 gists and the relative paucity of data on basal metabolism have prob- 

 ably been responsible for the failure of physiologists up to the present 

 time to apply the higher statistical methods in this field. While physi- 

 ologists have been engaged for several decades with the problem of the 

 exact measurement of the metabolism of man and the lower animals, 

 both by the direct determination of the amount of heat produced in 

 the calorimeter and by the indirect calculation of heat-production from 

 oxygen consumption and carbon-dioxide excretion, satisfactory data 

 have until recently been exceedingly limited. 



This state of affairs may be attributed to various causes. First of 

 all, satisfactory apparatus is expensive and technical requirements 

 exacting. The number of fully equipped laboratories and of adequately 

 trained workers have, therefore, been very limited. Again, there is a 

 personal element in all investigations based on normal human individ- 



1 Bell, Biometrika, 1911, 8, p. 232. 



2 Whiting, Biometrika, 1915, II, p. 8. 



3 Williams, Bell, and Pearson, Drapers' Company Res. Mem., Stud. Nat. Det., London, 1914,9. 



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