374 



Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



appears to lie an ingenious instrument for measuring delicacy of touch on the 

 principle of the lloberval bjilance on p. 212. "The action of the instrument 

 seems perfect, but it exist* as yet only as a working model." I do not know 

 whether any further account was published of it, nor liow it exactly functioned 

 physiologically. 



There are two Appendices to the paper; the tirst contains chiefly extracts 

 from the Exhibition pamphlet already discussed. The second indicates the 

 methods Galton was using for the reduction of his material, and gives a 

 certain immber of his results'. In this Appendix he siiys that he is prepared 

 to admit that the persons who applied to be measured were not possibly a 

 random sample of tnose who attended the Exhibition, nor the crowd who 

 visited the Exhibition a random sample of the British population, but 

 he considers that such a criticism nmst not be pushed unreasonably far. 

 Probably the data afford materials for testing the relations between various 

 bodily faculties, and the influence of occupation and birthplace. Although 

 in this paper he is dealing chiefly with statical anthropometric characters — 

 Le. those of least interest)— such treatment was a necessary preliminary to 

 further discussion and served to exemplify Galton's method of the statistical 

 scale, i.e. the use of percentiles. He considered — and at that time he was 

 justified in considering — that he was 



"presenting in a coin[)act and methodical form a great deal more concerning the distribution of 

 the measurements of man than has hitherto been attempted in a numerical form." (p. 275.) 



Galton deals only with adult males and adult females, of whom there were 

 4726 of the former and 1G57 of the latter. 



His first table gives the maximum or highest records among these adult 

 cases for seven characters. 



In all characters but sight'the male had a higher record, and if we deal 

 with the median values even there the male is higher than the female. Galton 

 concludes that 



"the female differs from the male more conspicuously in strength than in any other particular, 

 and therefore that the commonly used epithet of 'the weaker sex' is appropriate." (p. 278.) 



The lady, however, who could give a squeeze of 86 lbs.* is not to be despised, 



• See "Some Rettulta of the Anthropometric I.*il}oratory," J. A. I. Vol. xiv, pp. 275-87. 

 ' Thia is slightly in excess of the squeeze of the median adult male. Galton remarks that 



