528 THE STATURE OF MAN AT VARIOUS EPOCHS. 



enabled him aiiproxiniately to deduce the size of the entire bodj^ from 

 nothing but ihe measurement of a single bone like the femur. 

 Tables of this sort, it is true, existed in his time, provided by physi- 

 cians who practiced forensic medicine, but they did not inspire him 

 with confidence because the relations between the various parts of a 

 skeleton liad been established according to the principle of Paris or 

 Lyon — that is, for the human structure as represented by the existing 

 race of Frenchmen. But it is known that the relations between the 

 various parts of the body are not tlie same in all the races of the 

 present day; the principles for each are difterent. So much the 

 more likely it is they would be difl'erent among i)reliistoric races. 

 What is more, in a race like the French, there are two distinct types, 

 each having the same measurement, but the one class is long- 

 legged (macroscelic, in the term of the anthropologists), the other 

 short-legged (microscelic). A priori it would seem as though all 

 these difficulties w^ould dash the hope of establishing a relation more 

 or less fixed between the segment of a limb and the entire body. 

 But these are the very difficulties that the methods of anthropometry 

 were devised to overcome, and, as has been said, the method of Mon- 

 sieur Manouvrier has succeeded. 



AVhatever the means employed (and it is useless to recall them 

 here), Broca decided upon 1.80 meters as the height of the old man 

 of Cro-Magnon. Some other investigators estimated it at 1.78 

 meters, and Topinard Avent so far as to say it w^as 1.90 meters, a 

 figure altogether exceptional and unexampled up to this time in 

 the case of prehistoric man. The estimates of Rahon and Manou- 

 vrier were lower. They fixed the height of the old man at 1.780 

 meters; that of the woman at 1.658 meters, and that of the adult man 

 at 1.667 meters. Even these numbers betoken great height, superior, 

 certainly, to the average height of the inhabitants of France. The 

 race of Cro-Magnon, then, was a race of tall-bodied men. 



The stature of the man of Mentone, whose skeleton was discov- 

 ered by Eiviere in ground of the neolithic period of the Quaternary 

 age, was even larger. The caverns which exist in the red escarp- 

 ments rising from the broken stone road between Mentone and Vinti- 

 mille have furnished a fair number of bones, the last specimens being 

 those of a child, a woman, and a man. Their fragility does not 

 permit of their l)eing handled and renders their measurement a deli- 

 cate operation. From the tables of Monsieur Manouvrier the height 

 of the man is calculated to be 1.752 meters. Monsieur Reviere had 

 reckoned it to be from 1.1)5 to 2 meters. It is clear that if one should 

 consider the man of Mentone as the average type of the man of his 

 time, the race to which he belonged would have been superior in 

 stature to that which inhabits the same country to-day. They Avould 

 have compared in size with the tallest actual races of Europe, the 



