8io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



other features and habits of different nations, but we pass to the con- 

 sideration of a few special qualities. AVe are accustomed to distin- 

 guish our friends and acquaintances by their individual peculiarities, 

 and we think we find very marked differences between them. Every 

 man has his peculiarities of stature, girth, weight, color of hair, skin, 

 and eyes, proportion between his limbs, strength, and pulse, but they 

 all disappear, as Quetelet and others have shown, in the aggregate. 

 The margin of variations in the individual traits of men is shown, by 

 the measurements which these authors have applied to large groups, 

 to be really very small. Among large masses of the population of a 

 land as a whole, we find the same relative proportions of large, small, 

 and middle-sized men, and constant relations in the number of thin, 

 delicate, anc\ bandy-legged persons, Falstaffs, strong and weak, quick- 

 tempered and cool-blooded. The same is the case with the color 

 of the hair, eyes, and skin, as Virchow has shown in Germany and 

 Bertillon in the schools of France. Such a constancy in these traits 

 has been shown on all the points hitherto inquired into, that we are 

 able to draw similar conclusions on questions of race and national- 

 ity from these anthropological researches to those which the geologist 

 deduces from the strata concerning the age of the formation. 



Even those afflictions which we regai'd and lament as purely 

 casual visitations on some families, sucb as blindness and deaf-mutism, 

 exhibit a remarkable constancy of prevalence in whole societies. It 

 may be a sufficient illustration of this to mention the striking fact 

 that several computations of the number of persons suffering from 

 these defects in Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, made 

 independently of each other, at different times, and in different ways, 

 have given the same numerical results ; and that the numbers in 

 other states are curiously near to those in the two mentioned, often 

 differing only by a decimal. Although there are groups of states in 

 which somewhat different ratios prevail, the frequent recurrence of 

 the same average per ten thousand inhabitants, in a whole series of 

 states, and for different decades in time, justifies the assumption that 

 some law of proportion prevails, and forbids our supposing that the 

 number is merely an affair of accident. On the basis of a number of 

 coincidences of this kind, Quetelet constructed his ideal of the " average 

 man," as a general standard by which to estimate the conforming 

 proportion of the aggregate, and compare the individual with the type. 



From the natural peculiarities, from the compositional structure of 

 social bodies, we go a step further to their vital activities, their real 

 physiology. Henceforth we may consider the curious variances in 

 human generations, formerly regarded as accidental and voluntary 

 combinations, as subject to a strict laAv. Within the circle of our ac- 

 quaintance are childless families, and families that are blessed with 

 hosts of children ; families with all boys, and families with all girls ; 

 some strangely assorted marriages ; men of extraordinary age, while we 



