58 A BIOMETRIC STUDY OF BASAL METABOLISM IN MAN. 



men and women dealt with is one of its chief merits. If laboratory 

 studies of basal metabolism are to have a broad application in 

 medical and social science they should be made upon series representa- 

 tive of the population at large. It is only under these conditions that 

 generalizations of wide usefulness can be safely made. 



Our constants for body-weight, taken without clothing, in the various 

 series are given in table 11. 



For comparison with our own series of body-weights we are fortu- 

 nate in having the table of weight taken without clothing of 1,000 Harvard 

 men aged 18 to 25 years published by Professor Castle, 56 that for 

 Oxford undergraduates, weighed with clothing but without boots, 

 given by Schuster, 57 the values for 1,000 Cambridge men and 160 

 Cambridge women given by Pearson, 58 and Pearson's 59 reduction of 

 Francis Galton's series of body-weights, taken with ordinary indoor 

 clothing, for British men (N = 520) and women (AT = 276). Goring 

 has given a most valuable series from British prisons, 60 measured in 

 shirt and trousers only. For Germans (Bavarians) Pearson 61 has 

 determined constants for the 535 men and 340 women measured by 

 Bischoff. 



The results, uncorrected for weight of clothing, are as follows : 



Mean. S. D. C. V. 



Castle's Harvard men 65.66 7.84 11.94 



Schuster's Oxford men 68.91 7.45 10.80 



Pearson's Cambridge men 69.30 7.51 10'83 



Pearson's Cambridge women 56.97 6.36 11.17 



Galton's British men 64.86 4.54 10.37 



Galton's British women 55.34 4.60 13.37 



Goring's convicts 64.45 7.80 12.09 



Pearson's Bavarian men 50.17 10.?8 20.67 



Pearson's Bavarian women 41.92 10.51 25.07 



Unfortunately the number of series of body-weight measurements 

 available for comparison is small. Furthermore body-weight is a 

 much more variable character than stature. One must, therefore, 

 expect greater actual differences between series of observations made 

 at different times and places. How large the differences may be is 

 shown by the great discrepancy between the British and the Bavarians. 

 Our data show constants of roughly the same order of magnitude as 

 those available for comparison. 



In turning to the problem of the closeness of correlation in the 

 stature and weight of the subjects examined as a criterion of their 

 "normality" as compared with men at large, it will be important to 



58 Castle, Heredity and Eugenics, Cambridge, 1916, p. 61. 

 87 Schuster, Biometrika, 1911, 8, p. 49. 

 M Pearson, Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond., 1899, 66, p. 26. 



69 Pearson, The Chances of Death, 1 : 305, 1897. Constants slightly erroneous. 

 10 Goring, The English Convict, 1913, pp. 178-179. 



81 Pearson, The Chances of Death, 1: 305, 1897. We can offer no explanation for the 

 great variation in the German series. 



