69S 



NATURE 



[February 25, 19 15 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 

 \The Editor does not hold himself responsible for 

 opinions expressed by his correspondents. Neither 

 can he undertake to return, or to correspond with 

 the writers of, rejected manuscupts intended for 

 this or any other part of Nature. No notice ts 

 taken of anonymous communications.] 



Measurements of Medieval English Femora. 



As it was I who suggested to Dr. Lee the illus- 

 tration of her mathematical work by a consideration 

 of Dr. Parsons's recent paper on the English thigh 

 bone in the Journal of Anatomy, and as I am further 

 responsible for emphasising the extraordinary propor- 

 tion of the sexes reached by him (owing, as I believe, 

 to his fallacious method of sexing), I may, perhaps, 

 be permitted to reply to his letter in Nature of 

 February ii. , 



In the first place, I should like to make a general 

 defence of the action of the Biometric School in ventur- 

 ing to deal with what are too often supposed to be purely 

 anatomical matters ; I cannot forget that my criticism 

 of another distinguished anatomist some years ago 

 met with the reply, published in your columns, that he 

 had no intention' of discussing the matter with one 

 whom he stated had no anatomical training. In a 

 letter to Dr. Lee, Dr. Parsons emphasises the dis- 

 tinction between the man with anatomical knowledge 

 and the person who approaches these problems with 

 scientific training, but is wanting, so he assumes, in 

 observational experience. Nearly twenty-five years 

 ago, when I first entered from the mathematico- 

 statistical side upon the study of craniometry and 

 osteometry, I venture to think that there existed a 

 very general Continental opinion that British work on 

 these subjects was largely the product of dilettanti. 

 The object of the Biometric School was to reverse that 

 judgment, and to show foreigners, that we in England 

 could provide not only measurements, but methods 

 and results, which they would be compelled in self- 

 defence to adopt, extend, and imitate. In the course 

 of that quarter-century many thousands of crania, 

 many hundreds of skeletons have passed through 

 or remained in my Biometric Laboratory. _ We 

 have had the most generous help of quite a 

 number of highly trained anatomists, and have 

 been compelled to study many anatomical memoirs. 

 Is it likely that we should remain totally ignorant 

 of the phyycal properties of the material we have 

 had to deal with, or with the views of anatomists 

 with regard to it? Indeed, one of our extreme diffi- 

 culties has been the " pie-crust " character of many 

 of the bones coming into our hands. Experience, how- 

 ever, has convinced me that sex has very little indeed 

 to do with the destruction of either craniological or 

 osteological material. That depends to some extent on 

 age at death, but chiefly on the immediate physical 

 environment during the period before exhumation of 

 the individual skeletons. We are quite familiar with 

 the distressing experience involved in boxloads of bone 

 dust and bone fragments. But in the face of that 

 experience I state that Dr. Parsons's sexing of the 

 Rothwell femora which gives 64 per cent, males and 

 36 per cent, females is in error, and bears internal 

 evidence of this error. 



In the case of the Naqada skeletons which were 

 among the first brought to my laboratory the wastage 

 through the breaking up of material was excessive, 

 the quantity of bone dust and fragments practically 

 equalled the usable material ; the centuries of desert 

 exposure, and the long rough sea journey had pro- 

 duced a selection of bones some 6000 years old, 

 which, if Dr. Parsons's views were correct, should 



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have largely influenced the sex proportions. Yet on 

 a sexing based on far surer ground than Dr. Parsons's, 

 namely, on that of the crania and pelvic bones of the 

 skeletons, we found 59 per cent, of the bones were 

 female and only 41 per cent, of the bones male. Two 

 series of long bones from London plague pits sexed 

 anatomically gave only 56 per cent, males and 44 per 

 cent, females, and the selective destruction in this 

 material must have been very great. In this case 

 the mathematical sexing, using the bicondylar width— 

 which I shall show in a forthcoming memoir to be a 

 more trustworthy sexual character than the femoral 

 head— gave onlv 52 per cent, males and 48 per cent, 

 females. Where we find — as we do find occasionally 

 —a great disproportion in the sexes, and it is not due 

 to archaeological causes, i.e. battlefield interments, 

 chief or warrior burials, monastic settlements, etc., 

 it results, I believe, from the personal equation in- 

 volved in much anatomical sexing. I have watched 

 many an anatomist sexing; he may look at 

 numerous points, but he has rarely given them rela- 

 tive quantitative weights; he is almost certain 

 to be biassed by his pet sexual character in 

 the living, the shape of the forehead, the 

 bridge of the nose, the nape of the neck; from 

 nasion to basion there is not a single feature of the 

 skull which is not a pet sex-determinant to one man 

 or another. And it is just the same in the far more 

 difficult matter of long-bone sexing. It is the 

 obliquity of the femur with one man, the muscularity 

 with a second, the pilastric diameter with a third, 

 while Dr. Parsons, following Dwight, pins his faith 

 to the femoral head, and having reached results which 

 give an immense male preponderance, explains it by re- 

 stating the old axiom ^ that female bones cannot stand 

 the wear and tear which male bones may be expected, 

 owing to their stronger constitution, to survive. What 

 if the female bones were by their smaller size likely 

 to be subjected to a lower bending moment 

 relative to their flexural rigidity? But Dr. Par- 

 sons's own material answers himself. His missing 

 female bones are not the small but the large female 

 bones, precisely those bones which were likely to be 

 treated as male bones on his plan. If anyone with 

 experience of frequency distributions will examine his 

 distribution (on p. 256, Journal of Anatomy and Physio- 

 logy, vol. xlviii.) thev will find, not that the females 

 are abruptly cut off on the dwarf side, but that 

 females are abruptly cut off on the giant side, and 

 males on the dwarf side. Why? Because in trans- 

 ferring Dwight's rule based on the mixed material 

 of American dissecting rooms to an English medieval 

 population, he has not onlv overlooked the complete 

 diff'erence of race and time, but a still more important 

 point. Dwight was measuring moist bones with the 

 cartilage attached— and, if Dr. Parsons meant to apply 

 this rule, he should have subtracted 3 to 4 mm. from 

 Dwight's limiting values before applying them to his 

 own material ! 



Looking at Dr. Parsons's results on p. 256 1 can but 

 conclude that his sexing is based on a fallacy, and the 

 dip he has created in the Rothwell femora between 

 those with 45 and 47 mm. heads— the range of 

 Dwight's supposed doubtful sex— is due to conscious 

 or unconscious selection of his material; out of the 

 great masses of bones available at Rothwell 

 (which should have occupied in measurement of 

 many characters and in their adequate reduction 

 the whole time of a man for four or five years) 

 Dr. Parsons has chosen a small series giving a 

 remarkable dip at Dwight's limits, limits which I 

 venture to suggest have here no application. These 



1 I should like as a lavman to enter a vieorous protest against Dr. Par- 

 sons's, an anatomist's, opinion, that female bones disintegrate for the 

 same reason " as those of children ! 



