82 ^PROCEEDINGS OP THE ANATOMICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL 



ON CEETAIN PHYSICAL CHAEACTEES OF ABEEDEEN 

 MEDICAL STUDENTS. 



By W. E. MACDONELL, LL.D., University Lecturer on Statistical Methods. 

 (Bead 18th January, 1908.) 



I. MATERIAL AND METHODS OF OBSERVATION AND MEASUREMENT. 



1. The material on which the following paper is based was very 

 kindly placed at my disposal by Professor Reid, and consists of 

 measurements and observations taken in his Anthropometrical 

 Laboratory during the last twelve years. It has been his custom to 

 measure all the students who attend the Anatomy Class at the be- 

 ginning of their course, and he has also measured many of them towards 

 the end of their course, that is, after an interval of about four years. As 

 these measurements have been made by the Professor himself or his 

 trained assistants, their accuracy can be accepted with confidence. 



2. The characters recorded are forty-one in number, but to treat 

 them all mathematically would have required a very long time and 

 delayed the appearance of this paper indefinitely. I have, therefore, 

 made a selection of characters that are important in themselves, or 

 have been dealt with in other groups of the population by previous 

 investigators, so that they offer material for interesting comparisons. 

 Those that I have chosen are : 



(1) Head Circumference, the largest horizontal circumference 



measured with the steel tape over the glabella. 



(2) Head Length, from the glabella to the most distant point in 



the median plane. 



(3) Head Breadth, the greatest transversal diameter. 



(4) Head Height, from the auricular point (the depression just in 



