100 



THE RATE OF GROWTH 



CH. 



eagerly in the early nineteenth, when the exhaustion of the armies 

 of France and the evils of factory labour in England drew attention 

 to the stature and physique of man and to the difference between 

 the healthy and the stunted child*. 



A friend of BufPon's, the Count Philibert Gueneau de Montbeillard, 

 kept careful measurements of his own son; and Buifon pubhshed 

 these in 1777, in a supplementary volume of the Histoire Naturelle'f. 

 The child was born in April 1759; it was measured every six months 



10 



20 



Fig. 8. Annual increments of stature of the said French boy. 



for seventeen years, and the record gives a curve of great interest 

 and beauty (Fig. 7). There are two ways of studying such a 

 phenomenon — the statistical method based on large numbers, and 

 the careful study of the individual case; the curve of growth of this 

 one French child is to all intents and purposes identical, save that 

 the boy was throughout a trifle taller, with the mean curve yielded 

 by a recent study of forty-four thousand Uttle Parisians {. 



In young Montbeillard's case the "curve of first differences," or 

 of the successive annual increments of stature (Fig. 8), is clear and 

 beautiful. It shews (a) the rapid, but rapidly diminishing, rate of 



* Cf. M. Hargenvilliers, Recherches . . . sur . . .le recrutement de Varmie en France, 

 1817; J. W. Cowell, Measurements of children in Manchester and Stockport, 

 Factory Reports, i; and works referred to by Quetelet. 



t See Richard E. Scammon, The first seriatim study of human growth, Amer. 

 Journ. of Physical Anthropology, x, pp. 329-336, 1927. 



J MM. Variot et Chaumet,- Tables de croissance, dressees. . .d'apr^s les mensura- 

 tions de 44,000 enfants parisiens, Bull, et M4m. Soc. d'Anthropologie, iii, p. 55, 

 1906. 



