196 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fifth, nose, to be added, and our proportion of pure type becomes 

 almost infinitesimal. We are thus reduced to the extremity in 

 which my friend Dr. Ammon, of Baden, found himself when I 

 wrote asking for photographs of a pure Alpine type from the 

 Black Forest. He has measured thousands of heads, and yet he 

 answered that he really had not been able to find a perfect speci- 

 men in all details, as all his round-headed men were either blond, 

 or tall, or narrow-nosed, or something else that they ought not 

 to be. 



Confronted by this situation, the tyro is here tempted to turn 

 back in despair. There is no justification for it. It is not essen- 

 tial to our position that we should actually be able to isolate any 

 considerable number, nor even a single one, of our perfect racial 

 types in the life. It matters not to us that never more than a 

 small majority of any given population possesses even two phys- 

 ical characteristics in their proper association ; that relatively few 

 of these are able to add a third to the combination ; and that al- 

 most no individuals show a perfect union of all traits under one 

 head, so to speak, while contradictions and mixed types are every- 

 where present. Such a condition of affairs need not disturb us if 

 we understand ourselves aright. We should indeed be perplexed 

 were it otherwise. 



Consider how complex the problem really is ! We say the peo- 

 ple of Scotland are on the average among the tallest in Europe. 

 True ! But that does not mean that a great number of medium 

 and undersized persons do not occur among them. We may illus- 

 trate the actual condition best by means of the accompanying dia- 

 gram.* Three curves are plotted therein for the stature of large 

 groups of men chosen at random from each of three typical parts 

 of Europe. The one at the right is for the tall Scotch, the middle 

 one for the medium-sized northern Italians, and the one at the left 

 for Sardinians, the people of this island being among the shortest 

 in all Europe. The height of each curve at any given point indi- 

 cates the percentage within each group of men which possessed the 

 stature marked at the base of that vertical line. Thus eight per 

 cent of the Ligurian men were five feet and five inches tall (1*65 

 metres), while nine per cent of the Sardinians were fully two 

 inches shorter (1*60 metres). In either case these several heights 

 were the most common, although in no instance is the proportion 



* The curve for the Scotch, taken from the Report of the Anthropometric Committee of 

 the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1883, has been arbitrarily cor- 

 rected to correspond to the metric system employed by Dr. Livi in the other curves. A 

 centimetre is roughly equal to 0*4 of an inch. It is assumed that in consequence only 0*4 

 as many individuals will fall within each centimetre class as in the groups of stature differ- 

 ing by inches. The ordinates in the Scotch diagram have therefore been reduced to 0'4 of 

 their height in the original curve. 



