LINCOLN — STEWART 435 



CONCLUSIONS 



The picture that emerges from these anthropological comparisons 

 is the well-known one of Lincoln: a man of tall and slender build. 

 But we see a little more clearly that only in the linear dimensions 

 was he unusual. He may have been long-bodied, long-armed, and 

 long-limbed, but he was not otherwise an overly big man. Even his 

 well-remembered handshake was not so much the result of his "great 

 hands" as of his long hands. This bears out William Herndon's 

 description of Lincoln's physique (Hertz, 1940, p. 413) : 



In sitting down on a common chair or bench or ground, he was from the top 

 of his head down to his seat no better than the average man ; his legs and arms 

 were, as compared with the average man, abnormally, unnaturally long, though 

 when compared to his own organism, the whole physical man, these organs may 

 have been in harmony with the man. His arms and hands, feet and legs, seemed 

 to me, as compared with the average man, in undue proportion to the balance 

 of his body. It was only when Lincoln rose on his feet that he loomed up above 

 the mass of men. He looked the giant then. 



A stature of 6 feet 4 inches is not generally thought of in the United 

 States as extraordinary; yet statistically it is fairly uncommon, for 

 it is to be found in only a small fraction of 1 percent of the male 

 population. To Lincoln, the politician, this meant that he would be 

 conspicuous in any ordinary assembly. During the Lincoln-Douglas 

 debates, for example, an audience might not have recognized Douglas 

 immediately, but they could not miss Lincoln — or forget his height 

 and build. From this remembrance of linear bigness it was easy to 

 slip into exaggerations of other body proportions, especially if one 

 had come under the spell of Lincoln's personality and mind. 



The precious replicas of Lincoln's face provided by Volk and Mills, 

 and preserved in the Nation's Capital for all to see, are the most 

 reliable of all such reproductions so far as now known. Unquestion- 

 ably they provide sure evidence that from the physical standpoint 

 Lincoln was a fairly typical member of the American pioneer stock. 



The meaning of other details of these masks, as, for instance, the 

 skin folds and facial asymmetries, may be read with less certainty 

 and even with more or less conscious bias. In this connection atten- 



Society obtained recently at the sale of the Barrett-Lincoln collection, have been measured 

 for me by Dr. Paul M. Angle, secretary and director. By inserting wooden strips cut to 

 different lengths, Dr. Angle decided that 11 inches was the length of foot most likely to 

 have been comfortably accommodated in the left moccasin. (Personal communication 

 dated November 13, 1952.) 



Substituting the figure 11 (or 279 mm.) in the calculations outlined above, we get a 

 foot breadth of 84 mm. and a foot index of 30.1 for Lincoln's left foot. This foot breadth, 

 as shown in figure 2, is just above the minimum (82) for Hrdlieka's Old Americans. 



Dr. Louis A. Warren, director of the Lincoln National Life Foundation, Fort Wayne, 

 Ind., has called my attention to newspaper clippings in the collection of the Foundation 

 showing rather different outlines (claimed to be originals) of Lincoln's feet. This sug- 

 gests that the outline published by Kahler may be a somewhat smoothed-out version of 

 the original tracing. 



