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DISCUSSION 



Olbrich: Dr. Sinclair, you compared Dutch, English and German 

 children; what was the standard? Did you compare the average height 

 of the population in these different countries? . 



Sinclair: That is an extremely important question, which concerned 

 us very much when we were studying the heights and weights, because 

 of the enormous differences in different racial groups. The Bavarian 

 children are shorter and stockier than the northern children, but the 

 standards employed in Germany tended to come from the south, from 

 von Pirquet's clinic, and he was largely studying Bavarian children who 

 were not typical of the children we saw up in the north. Therefore I did 

 select for the chart I showed children whom we regarded as being racially 

 comparable with English children from which our standard was adopted. 



Medawar: I should like to ask Dr. Sinclair a question about delayed 

 maturation in relation to the increased expectation of life. He quoted 

 some figures suggesting very tentatively that one year's delayed matura- 

 tion might be worth seven extra years of life, and he also mentioned 

 Morant's investigation of whether or not Englishmen had grown larger 

 in the course of the last century. As I remember it, Morant's data 

 showed that Englishmen had not increased in size over the past hundred 

 years, but that they had reached their maximum size, if you take that as 

 an index of maturity, no less than five years earlier. In other words we are 

 reaching maturity today five years earlier than was the case in about 

 1850. Should that not be correlated with a rather dramatic change in 

 the mean expectation of life? xVctually, the mean expectation of life at 

 say forty, fifty or sixty hasn't changed very much over the last himdred 

 years, but, in so far as it has changed, it lias increased. There is some 

 inconsistency there which perhaps ought to be clarified. 



Sinclair: Yes, I think that is important. If we take the reaching of 

 adult size as our index of maturation, Morant showed that what appears 



