236 PROBLEMS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 



that the figures only dispose of the notion, if it still survives, 



that prehistoric men were all sons of Anak. 



Dr Beddoe I pass on now to consider Dr Beddoe's elaborate inquiry into 

 on stature fa e stature an ^ fafc O f man j n ffc British J s / es i It deals only with 



the stature of men of the present day but incidentally it illustrates 

 the question we have in hand. "We find," he writes, "that 

 wherever the Scandinavian element is proved to be strong by 

 historical, topographical, or linguistic evidence, the stature is 

 high. This is the case in Shetland, Caithness, the eastern 

 lowlands of Scotland generally, in Dumfriesshire, Cumberland, 

 Westmoreland, Lonsdale, Durham, Yorkshire (except Sheffield 

 and Haworth), Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire, 

 and in the hundreds of Flegg in East Norfolk." These con- 

 clusions, founded as they are on a large number of measurements, 

 we may look upon as thoroughly dependable. They make it 

 clear that stature is very largely a matter of race, and they 

 suggest that it is constant throughout long periods. It might be 

 argued that height may possibly have increased or diminished 

 uniformly throughout the British Isles, the short and tall races 

 maintaining their positions relatively to one another. This is, 

 no doubt, possible, but it is likely that a tendency that acted 

 uniformly throughout a long period would leave good evidence 

 of itself. We should find the men of the present day to be 

 markedly either taller or shorter than the men of generations 

 some centuries back. Now if we inspect the collection of suits 

 of armour in the Tower, we find that the wearers must have 

 been, most of them, neither dwarfs nor giants. There is one 

 suit, it is true, made for a man of some 6 ft. lo in. And 

 Henry VIII. was obviously a man of great stature and bulk. 

 But the collection as a whole suggests that height then, some 

 three or four centuries back, was much as it is now. There has 

 been a great deal of talk about the evidence supplied by armour 

 of the inferior bulk of our ancestors as compared with ourselves. 

 Guardsmen have inspected the Tower collection and have 

 remarked that they could not get into many of the suits. Nor, 

 we may reply, are a large percentage of Englishmen up to the 



1 Memoirs of the Anthropological Society, vol. iii. p. 384. 



