1208 REPORT—1885. 
ences of bringing up, and its inconsiderable influence on the rate of mortality. 
Other advantages which are not equally obvious are no less great. One of these 
lies in the fact that stature is not a simple element, but a sum of the accumulated 
lengths or thicknesses of more than a hundred bodily parts, each so distinct from 
the rest as to have earned a name by which it can be specified. The list of them 
includes about fifty separate bones, situated in the skull, the spine, the pelvis, the 
two legs, and the two ankles and feet. The bones in both the lower limbs are 
counted, because it is the average length of these two limbs that contributes to the 
general stature. The cartilages interposed between the bones, two at each joint, 
are rather more numerous than the bones themselves. The fleshy parts of the 
scalp of the head and of the soles of the feet conclude the list. Account should 
also be taken of the shape and set of many of the bones which conduce to a more 
or less arched instep, straight back, or high head. I noticed in the skeleton of 
O’Brien, the Irish giant, at the College of Surgeons, which is, I believe, the tallest 
skeleton in any museum, that his extraordinary stature of about 7 feet 7 inches 
would have been a trifle increased if the faces of his dorsal vertebrae had been more 
parallel and his back consequently straighter. 
The beautiful regularity in the statures of a population, whenever they are 
statistically marshalled in the order of their heights, is due to the number of 
variable elements of which the stature is the sum. ‘The best illustrations I have 
seen of this regularity were the curves of male and female statures that I obtained 
from the careful measurements made at my Anthropometric Laboratory in the 
International Health Exhibition last year. They were almost perfect. 
The multiplicity of elements, some derived from one progenitor, some from 
another, must be the cause of a fact that has proved very convenient in the course 
of my inquiry. It is that the stature of the children depends closely on the average 
stature of the two parents, and may be considered in practice as having nothing 
to do with their individual heights. The fact was proved as follows :—After 
transmuting the female measurements in the way already explained, I sorted the 
children of parents who severally differed 1, 2, 8, 4, and 5 or more inches into 
separate groups. Each group was then divided into similar classes, showing the 
number of cases in which the children differed 1, 2, 8, &c. inches from the com- 
mon average of the children in their respective families. I confined my inquiry 
to large families of six children and upwards, that the common average of each 
might be a trustworthy point of reference. The entries in each of the ditferent 
groups were then seen to run in the same way, except that in the last of them the 
children showed a faint tendency to fall into two sets, one taking after the tall 
parent, the other after the short one. Therefore, when dealing with the transmis- 
sion of stature from parents to children, the average height of the two parents, or, 
as I prefer to call it, the ‘mid-parental’ height, is all we need care to know about 
them. 
It must be noted that I use the word parent without specifying the sex. 
The methods of statistics permit us to employ this abstract term, because the cases 
of a tall father being married to a short mother are balanced by those of a short 
father being married to a tall mother. I use the word parent to save a complica- 
tion due to a fact brought out by these inquiries, that the height of the children 
of both sexes, but especially that of the daughters, takes after the height of the 
father more than it does after that of the mother, My present data are insufficient 
to determine the ratio satisfactorily. 
Another great merit of stature as a subject for inquiries into heredity is that 
marriage selection takes little or no account of shortness or tallness. There are 
undoubtedly sexual preferences for moderate contrast in height, but the marriage 
choice appears to be guided by so many and more important considerations that 
questions of stature exert no perceptible influence upon it. This is by no means 
my only inquiry into this subject, but, as regards the present data, my test lay in 
dividing the 205 male parents and the 205 female parents each into three groups— 
tall, medium, and short (medium being taken as 67 inches and upwards to 70 
inches), and in counting the number of marriages in each possible combination 
between them. ‘The result was that men and women of contrasted heights, short 
