400 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



GLASGOW'S BANDY-LEGGED CHILDREN. 



By GEORGE HAY, M. D. 



LAST summer the writer crossed the Atlantic and visited his na- 

 tive country, Scotland. His parents, now well advanced in 

 years, were living in Glasgow, and he found himself at home. On the 

 first Sunday after his arrival he took an extensive walk through the 

 city, and, of course, observed the people, young and old, male and 

 female. He noticed very few good-looking men or women in Glasgow. 

 The men are, for the most part, short and squat, while the women 

 are undersized, and anything but handsome. The people of both sexes 

 physically differ entirely from the men and women of Edinburgh, 

 who, as a rule, are straight and strong, well-featured and intelligent, 

 and excellent examples of manly and womanly beauty. The prin- 

 cipal industry of Glasgow — the building of iron and steel ships — 

 demands a great deal of unskilled or rather of low-grade labor, and 

 the ranks of the laborers are recruited from Ireland. Thousands of 

 Irishmen are employed in this work, and earn very high wages — from 

 twelve to fourteen pounds sterling in two weeks. The average riveter 

 is a mere animal, given to eating, and drinking, and debauchery, and, 

 as a consequence, despite his high wages, he is continually on the rag- 

 ged edge of poverty, misery, and destitution. Of course, there are 

 some exceptions to this general rule, and they soon become inde- 

 pendent. 



If, choosing some fine day when children are apt to be on the streets, 

 we take a walk of a single mile in any direction in the city, we are 

 sure to notice from fifty to one hundred children, between the ages of 

 two and thirteen years, whose legs are deformed and distorted in ways 

 which are remarkable, and to degrees which are really hideous. One 

 would think that the whole juvenile population was suffering from 

 rachitis or from osteomalacia. The lines in the annexed figures, in pairs, 

 indicating the general contour of the leg and foot, will convey some 

 notion of the deformities, of which hundreds of living examples may 

 be seen on the streets of Glasgow. The short, straight lines, at the 

 bottom of each pair, indicate the feet. It is generally the bones of 

 the lower limb from the knee downward, the tibise and the fibulro, 

 which are bent in the manner indicated in the drawings, in which care 

 has been taken to avoid exaggeration. 



In addition to those here illustrated, examples may be seen of for- 

 ward or backward, regular or irregular curvature, single or double 

 curvature of one leg, with an outward or inward, regular or irregular, 

 single or double curvature of the other leg. In short, the legs of Glas- 

 gow children may be seen twisted and distorted in every imaginable 

 direction. Some of these deformities are painful to look upon, though 



