SECTION G. 
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SCIENCE. 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
By T. A. Cocuuan, F.S.S., Government Statistician 
of N.S.W. 
CHILD MEASUREMENT. 
ANTHROPOMETRY means not only the measurement of the 
proportions of the human body and its parts, but also the 
measurement of human faculty generally, including sensi- 
bility to heat, sense of location, and the effects of fatigue. 
Though sometimes described as a branch of anthropology, 
it is rather a scientific method of investigation than ascience 
itself, and is therefore a branch of Statistics. 
From very early times, measurements of the human body 
have been made by those who devoted themselves to the 
representation, in marble or pigment, of the form of man ; 
but the artist sought only ideals of human symmetry, models 
of male and female beauty, and therefore measured none 
but the well-formed. The statistician cannot afford thus 
to pick and choose the objects of his investigation. He 
must measure people just as they are, without selection, 
indifferent alike to the perfection of face and figure sought 
by the sculptor, as to the deformities delightful to the 
caricaturist and the satirist of human frailty. 
Modern and scientific anthropometry owes its origin to 
Quetelet, the Belgian Statistician, who sought “to find 
what is typical in man,” noting “the variations due to 
sex, age, race, and social condition.” Since Quetelet’s time, 
there has been considerable progress in the methods adopted 
for securing exact measurements, and the extent of the 
interest taken in the matter may be surmised from the 
fact that a recent catalogue of works upon anthropometry 
shows the names of 662 authors, and of 1048 publications. 
England, the United States, France, Germany, Belgium, 
Italy, Russia, Poland, Denmark, and Sweden, all contribute 
to the sum of knowledge attained by anthropometrical 
methods, and the material already published is a full store- 
house of learning and research, of extreme interest, not 
