ascertainment of the physical proportions of recruits in different 

 countries, but also because of the frequent changes in military rules 

 and regulations, varying widely according to the available recruiting 

 material and the numbers actually required to meet the exigencies of 

 military service. Conclusions frequently advanced to the effect that 

 the physique of any given country has improved or deteriorated on the 

 basis of recruiting statistics are decidedly misleading and every 

 authority on military statistics rejects unconditionally the assumption 

 that the data can be used for the purpose of ascertaining physical 

 progress or decay. The older recruiting statistics are therefore not 

 comparable with modern statistics, and even these can be utilized for 

 only a comparatively short period of time and a few of the more 

 important countries of the world. For Germany the general statistics 

 are perhaps the most extensive, but on account of the fact that 

 the scientific details, especially as regards anthropometric averages, have 

 not been made public by the Imperial Government they fall measurably 

 short in practical usefulness of the corresponding statistics for France, 

 for Scandinavia, for Italy, etc. 



RACE IN RELATION TO PHYSICAL PROPORTIONS 



Every authority on anthropology and anthropometry concedes the 

 supreme importance of race as an underlying determining condition or 

 consideration in the physical proportions or dimensions of the recruit- 

 ing material under consideration. The term race is not one which 

 permits of precise definition, for entirely pure races are certainly no 

 longer met with in European countries. It is generally held that the 

 average stature or the distribution, or more accurately, perhaps, the 

 frequency distribution, of height according to age and sex, is more 

 directly determined by heredity on the basis of racial antecedents than 

 by any other physical factor excepting color, hair, skin pigmenta- 

 tion and the shape and size of the skull. Race, in however crude a 

 sense. the term may be used, is largely conditioned by the locality of 

 birth of the recruiting material examined, and for the purpose of 

 scientific conclusiveness the ratio of rejections for physical reasons 

 or the anthropometric data ascertained by precise methods of measur- 

 ing should be accurately correlated to the place of birth and not to the 

 place of residence. Still more trustworthy and conclusive would be 

 statistics of physique according to ancestry, which for practical pur- 

 poses might be limited to the country of birth of the mother. This 

 limitation has been found sufficient in mortality investigations, which 

 exhibit the same definite relationship between disease predisposition or 

 disease resistance on the basis of inherited ancestral traits as has been 

 shown to be the case in the inheritance of physical proportions of the 

 body, chiefly, however, in the average stature and its frequency distri- 

 bution as determined by modern mathematical statistical processes. 



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