Ill] 



QUETELET'S ANTHROPOMETRIE 



61 



The rate of growth in Man. 



Man will serve us as well as another organism for our first 

 illustrations of rate of growth ; and we cannot do better than go 

 for our first data concerning him to Quetelet's Anthro'pometrie* , an 

 epoch-making book for the biologist. For not only is it packed 

 with information, some of it still unsurpassed, in regard to human 

 growth and form, but it also merits our highest admiration as the 

 first great essay in scientific statistics, and the first work in which 

 organic variation was discussed from the point of view of the 

 mathematical theory of probabilities. 



Fig. 3. Curve of Growth in Man, from birth to 20 yrs (3) ; from Quetelet's Belgian 

 data. The upper curve of stature from Bowditch's Boston data. 



If the child be some 20 inches, or say 50 cm. tall at birth, and 

 the man some six feet high, or say 180 cm., at twenty, we may 

 say that his average rate of growth has been (180 — 50)/20 cm., or 

 6-5 centimetres per annum. But we know very well that this is 



* Brussels, 1871. Cf. the same author's Physique sociale, 1835, and Lettres 

 sur la theorie des probabilites, 1846. See also, for the general subject, Boyd, R., 

 Tables of weights of the Human Body, etc. Phil. Trans, vol. cli, 1861 ; Roberts, 

 C, Manual of Aiithropometry, 1878; Daffner, F., Das Wachsthum des Menschen 

 (2nd ed.), 1902, etc. 



