610 Professor Joseph Barcroft [June 9, 



lation may be divided into two categories, namely, the Anglo-Saxon 

 officials and the native labourers. The latter are of Indian descent, 

 and as a race have lived at this altitude for many generations. In 

 Cerro they are designated " Cholo," a name that has no exact anthro- 

 pological significance, but I shall use it and so avoid an assumption 

 of anthropological knowledge which I do not possess. 



To judge from the customs which prevail in the outlying villages, 

 the Cholo is not far removed from a very primitive civilisation. 

 Within a mule-ride of Gollarisquisga there are communities in which 

 private ownership of land does not exist ; the land, as in some of the 

 Russian communities which are, or were, on the Canadian prairie, 

 belongs to the village. The produce, if the village is small, is placed 

 in the church ; in the larger villages there is a store for this purpose. 

 If the stock of some community has run out, some person goes to 

 such a market as Huaucayo and buys some more, not for himself, 

 but for the village. I said " buys " ; but there are places to which 

 money has scarcely penetrated, and where the exchange of com- 

 modities is still a process of barter. The condition of medical science 

 in these villages may be gathered from the fact that such nostrums 

 as horse-dung and well-kept human urine occupy an honourable 

 place in the pharmacopoeia, and that a custom appears to linger by 

 which, when the practitioner has done his best — or worst — and failed, 

 the services of another official are called in, He is the " despenador," 

 or "putter out of pain." I need say no more of his or her duties 

 than to give the following quotation from Bensley's " Spanish and 

 English Dictionary " : " Despenadora — a woman who is supposed to 

 push her elbow into the stomach or breast of dying persons to relieve 

 them from agony." * 



It seems clear, then, that the Cholo, not the Cholo of Cerro de 

 Pasco or Oroya, but some of the far outlying districts, has been 

 little touched by the Spanish or even the Inca civilisation, and that 

 in him we have a subject for physiological research whose like has 

 varied little for generations. In physique he is short in stature and 

 sallow, or with some blood in his cheeks. That part of his anatomy 

 which was principally of interest to our party was his chest. We 

 made a considerable number of chest measurements. As regards the 

 chest circumference the following statement sums up our findings. 

 We based our measurements on Prof. Dreyer's tables, accepting his 

 estimate of the normal ratio between the trunk length and the chest 

 circumference. We ascertained that the average circumference of 

 the Cholo chests which we measured would noi-mally be 79 cm. It 

 was, in point of fact, 92 cm. As a rough check we measured our 

 own trunk chest ratios and those of the American and British 

 engineers, a community of fine physical development. The circum- 



* I am indebted for this quotation and much else to Mr. Murdock, manager 

 of the coal mine at Quishuarcancha. 



