426 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



ception of Milan and Venice. The towns no doubt contain 

 a larger proportion of the upper and well-nourished classes ; 

 the poverty of the Italian peasantry is notoriously great, so 

 that this superiority in mean stature of the townspeople 

 might have been expected. Ouetelet long ago 1 showed 

 that in Brabant, at conscription ages, this superiority existed, 

 and Amnion 2 has demonstrated it in Carlsruhe and Freiburg- 

 in-Brisgau ; but it remains uncertain whether the inferiority 

 of the peasantry may not be due merely to retarded develop- 

 ment, and whether it may not wholly disappear before the 

 completion of growth, or, say, by the twenty-fifth year. As 

 for coloration, Virchow's great inquest into that of the 

 German school children, and George Mayr's publication 

 on the same subject, as well as my own observations on 

 British adults, point to the existence of a majority of much- 

 pigmented people in towns as compared with rural districts, 

 whatever may be the causes of the phenomenon ; but these 

 Italian statistics do not, so far as published, appear to carry 

 us any farther. 



Another important department of anthropometry, that 

 of the effect of pathological conditions on the stature, has 

 been well handled by Livi, who has some very pregnant 

 material wherewith to deal in the figures relating to districts 

 infested with goitre, malaria, and pellagra. 



Of these three deteriorating causes, the first, though it 

 may not, perhaps, be quite so widely diffused throughout 

 the kingdom as the second, is vastly more powerful 

 in its own domains. In Aosta, the district which stands 

 worst in this respect, and which, as we have noted, 

 stands at the head of the lists of brachycephaly and fair 

 complexion, the number of young men rejected for goitre, 

 during the period 1863-76, was no less than 317 per cent., 3 

 and this was after 267 per cent, had been rejected for 

 deficient stature ; for in Italy measurement precedes medical 

 examination of the conscripts. Of these 7*1 had a stature 



1 Quetelet, Anthropometric. Brux, 1870. 



2 Amnion, Naturliche Aus/ese beim Menschen. Jena, 1893. 



8 Sormani, Geographia Nosologica <r Italia. Annul, di stat. Roma, 

 1877. 



