332 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1946: 
error, based upon measurements taken on a few individuals by various 
inaccurate procedures. To remedy this situation the Department of 
Agriculture has undertaken to provide reliable measurements of an 
adequate sample of the population. So far only women and children 
have been studied. The women number 14,698, which is a very small 
proportion of the approximately 45 millions in the country. Also, 
only 7 States (Arkansas, California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, 
North Carolina, Pennsylvania) and the District of Columbia are 
represented. By reference to figure 11 it will be seen that all these 
States, except Arkansas and perhaps North Carolina, are in the low- 
stature area. Thus, although this study has attempted to get a ran- 
dom sample, it has not wholly succeeded. Moreover, since the em- 
phasis here is on tailoring, relatively few of the measurements are 
suitable for general comparison. 
Old Americans.——One more anthropometric project carried out 
under a Government agency may be mentioned. This is the study of 
Old Americans by AleS Hrdlicka of the United States National 
Museum. At the time this study was undertaken conflicting views 
were held regarding the nature of the earlier comers to this country 
as well as their successors up to the time when immigration assumed 
large proportions. These uncertainties could be resolved, Hrdlicka 
believed, by examining the descendants of this early population. 
The term “Old American” has already been defined. If used in the 
strict sense that all the ancestors on both sides were in this land before 
1830, obviously the group is fast disappearing. As Hrdlicka says: 
In the beginning of the studies it seemed desirable to make the limit of four, 
or still better five, generation Americans; but on trial this was found quite im- 
practicable. When the eastern and southern communities, where considerable 
inbreeding has taken place and the subjects from which would obviously not be 
the most desirable for our purposes were excluded, it was found that those who 
could qualify to four or five generations of pure American ancestry on both sides 
were astonishingly scarce, and that also, on the whole, they represented rather 
too much of social differentiation. Even those of three generations pure native 
ancestry are far less common than might at first be imagined. [1925, p. 5.] 
Since this work was carried out with maximum precision and with 
the biological point of view, it furnishes a useful description of a 
selected element of the American population. Although the Old 
Americans examined by Hrdlicka had a limited geographical dis- 
tribution and the total did not exceed 2,000, his results have been 
confirmed by Bean and Carter. 
Incidentally, a comparison of stature between the Old American 
females and the Department of Agriculture garment-series females 
shows the latter to be the shorter by nearly 1.5 cm. (161.85 vs. 160.42). 
This is probably due to the foreign element in the latter less selected 
series, 
