Fairchild: The Chinese Petsai as a Salad Vegetable 295 



tion of these food habits into our hands, 

 and, on the ground of chemical analy- 

 ses and dietetic experiments carried out 

 on rats and guinea-pigs and "poison 

 squads" of men and women, determine 

 the real value of these new foods ; 

 then by experiments on the farms find 

 out the relative cost of growing them, 

 the best places to grow them and the 



extension of territory which will re- 

 sult by their cultivation; then on the 

 basic groundwork of sound knowledge 

 conduct a campaign of publicity such 

 as no food manufacturer even dares 

 to conduct and plant the new food 

 product in the minds of the people 

 where it will remain until something 

 better is discovered. 



Heredity of Stature in Man 



Dr. C. B. Davenport, Director of the 

 Department of Experimental Evolution 

 of the Carnegie histitution of Wash- 

 ington, in cooperation with the Eu- 

 genics Record Office, has completed a 

 study of inheritance of human stature, 

 which has been published in Genetics. 

 "Stature has long been a classical object 

 of investigation, largely because it is 

 so readily measured. Thus, in 1889, 

 Galton published 'his studies on stature 

 in parents and children and their in- 

 terrelation. This led to Professor Karl 

 Pearson's remarkable series of investi- 

 gations, 'Mathematical Contributions to 

 the Theory of Evolution,' that founded 

 the biometric school, which has left its 

 imprint on bioiogy. though it has proved 

 disappointing in its assistance to^ the 

 study of heredity. Though stature is 

 the end-result of a number of indepen- 

 dently varying elements, still, because 

 of facts that determine growth as a 

 whole, and because the length of the 

 separate segments of stature are sep- 

 arately inheritable, it is possible to find 

 some law of inheritance of the trait. 



The present study was made on data 

 derived from 3,298 children, their 1,738 

 parents, and a number of grandparents, 

 uncles, and aunts. A large proportion 

 of these were especially measured at 

 their homes in various parts of the 

 country. The hypothesis is supported 



that while short parents tend, on the 

 average, to have short children, they 

 may, and frequently do, carry germ-cells 

 which lack the shortening factors ; on 

 the other hand, all of the children of 

 tall parents are tall. Consequently the 

 ofifspring of two very short or short 

 parents are more variable in stature 

 than the offspring of two very tall or 

 tall parents as 2.4 is to 2.2. Also, 

 whereas the offspring of two very short 

 or short parents tend, on the average, to 

 be less extreme than the parents, this 

 is not true of the offspring of two 

 very tall or tall parents. 



Not only is stature as a whole in- 

 herited, but also, and even more clearfy, 

 each segment of stature, such as neck, 

 length of torso, thigh, and foreleg ; and 

 the inheritance of the length of these 

 segments follows the same law as does 

 stature as a whole. An interesting by- 

 product of this study is that persons 

 of similar stature tend to marry each 

 other, and the more extreme their 

 stature the more particular are persons 

 in this respect. Among 869 matings 

 that of a very short man to a very 

 tall woman occurred only once, or one- 

 tenth the expected number of times, 

 while the marriage of a very tall man 

 to a very short woman did not occur 

 at all." — From the Annual Report of 

 the Director, 1917, pp. 128-129. 



