ENVIRONMENT AND STATURE 47 



local areas of extreme poverty. The soil is unkindly 

 and the climate harsh, and chesnuts form the staple 

 diet. The natives of these regions average inches 

 less in height than their neighbours, and the per- 

 centage of the young men who fail to come up to the 

 army standard in height and girth is abnormally 

 large. The slums of great towns show similar results. 



The influence of environment is most acute on 

 children. The Anthropological Committee of the 

 British Association long ago showed the beneficent 

 effect of the Factory Acts, which rescued young chil- 

 dren from the hardships of daily toil. Boys of nine 

 years in 1873 had a height and weight equivalent to 

 the height and weight of boys of ten years old in 1833. 

 The direct effects of the environment, however, 

 appear to escape inheritance, for children removed 

 from conditions inducing low stature, to more 

 favourable conditions, attain normal height if the 

 change has been made sufficiently soon. Children 

 of normal parentage placed in unfavourable sur- 

 roundings at once respond to the new condition. 

 Nature, with respect to stature, is dominant over 

 nurture. 



These three zoological criteria of race, cranial 

 index, colouration and stature, are on the average 

 inherited. Everyone knows that tall children may 

 be born of short parents, dark-eyed children of fair 

 parents, and to a much smaller extent round-headed 

 children of long-headed parents. Individuals repre- 

 senting unmixed racial types are almost non-existent 

 in the modern population of Europe, and, did they 

 exist, the chances of their meeting and mating are 

 infinitesimal. The results have to be worked out on 



