24 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



if heredity means anything, to retain some traces of its relatively 

 degenerate derivation. This is indeed the case. In Dordogne this 

 contingent included nearly seven per cent more deficient statures 

 than the normal average. Quite independently, in the distant 

 department of Herault, Lapouge discovered the same thing. He 

 found in some cantons a decrease of nearly an inch in the average 

 stature of this unfortunate generation, while exemptions for de- 

 ficiency of stature suddenly rose from six to sixteen per cent.* 

 This selection is not, however, entirely maleficent. A fortunate 

 compensation is afforded in another direction. For the gener- 

 ation conceived of the men returned to their families at the close 

 of the war has shown a distinctly upward tendency almost as well 

 marked. Those who survived the perils and privations of serv- 

 ice were presumably in many cases the most active and rugged ; 

 the weaker portion having succumbed in the meanwhile, either to 

 wounds or sickness. The result was that the generation con- 

 ceived directly after the war was as much above the average, 

 especially evinced in general physique perhaps more than in 

 stature, as their predecessors, born of war times, were below the 

 normal. 



Another illustration of the operation of artificial selection in 

 determining the stature of any given group of men appears in 

 the physique of immigrants to the United States. In the good old 

 days when people emigrated from Europe because they had seri- 

 ously cast up an account and discovered that they could better 

 their condition in life by coming to America that is, before the 

 days when they came because they were overpersuaded by steam- 

 ship agents, eager for the commissions on the sale of tickets, or 

 because of the desire of their home governments to be rid of 

 them in those days investigation revealed that on the average 

 the immigrants were physically taller than the people from whom 

 they sprang. This difference, in some instances, amounted to 

 upward of an inch upon the average. Among the Scotch, a 

 difference of nearly two inches was shown to exist by the meas- 

 urements taken during our civil war. These immigrants were a 

 picked lot of men picked, because it required all the courage 

 which physical vigor could give to pull up stakes and start life 

 anew. This law that natural emigrants, if I may use the term, 

 are taller than the stay-at-home average was again exemplified 

 during the civil war in another way. It was found that recruits 

 hailing from States other than those in which they were born 

 were generally taller than those who had always remained in the 



* For further details, vide the excellent analysis by Dr. Collignon, in Memoires de la 

 Societe d'Anthropologie, Paris, series iii, vol. i, p. 36 seq., and Dr. Lapouge, in Les Selec- 

 tions Sociales, pp. 208 and 234 seq. A most noteworthy treatise in many ways. Vide also 

 Bulletin de la Societe Languedocienne de Geographic, xvii, p. 355 seq. 



