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1891.] Editorial. 717 
EDITORIAL. 
EDITORS, E. D. COPE AND J. S. KINGSLEY. 
MONG the many uncritical propositions urged by would-be 
reformers in recent years, few are more so than some of 
those anent the interesting subject of women’s waists. We are 
repeatedly told that a narrow waist is a deformity produced by 
artificial compression, and that the just model for the healthy 
normal woman is the robust and matronly Venus of Milo. Now 
the anthropologist knows that this general assertion is not true 
as applied to the civilized white woman. It is especially charac- 
teristic of the highest types of woman of the Indo-European 
race to have wide hips and a narrow waist, up to the age when 
adipose tissue fills to greater uniformity of outline, the graceful 
curve which is so generally admired. It is well known that the 
form of the pelvis differs in the different races, so that in the 
white race the female pelvis differs from that of the male more 
than is the case with the African. In the latter the female pelvic 
strait is as in the male, longer in anteroposterior than in trans- 
verse diameter; in the female Mongolian the strait is subquadrate 
in outline, while in the Indo-European the strait is oval, with the 
transverse diameter greater than the anteroposterior. Thus the 
white woman has wider hips than the woman of inferior races, 
and she is in so far more unlike the male than they. The larger 
pelvic cavity of the female is an adaptation to the increase in the- 
bulk of its contents incident to gestation; and it follows that 
when this cavity is not so occupied, the moveable viscera fill the 
space. From this results the contraction of the abdominal walls 
immediately above the pelvis known as the waist. It is then 
clear that the diameter of the waist is inversely as the diameter 
of the pelvis, and the differential of diameter is greatest as the 
transverse diameter of the pelvis exceeds the anteroposterior. 
The cause of the increased transverse diameter of the Indo- 
European pelvic strait is probably mechanical. It may be due 
Am. Nat.—August.—3. 
