232 
Miscellanea 
II. On Pulse and Breathing Rates and their Relation to Stature. 
By JULIA BELL, M.A. 
In the Deutsches Archiv fur klinische Medizin (December 1910, S. 267 — 282), Dr KorneU 
Korosy published a very interesting medico-statistical paper entitled " Studien iiber Puis- und 
Atmungsfrequenz." The author obtained the statistics upon which his paper is based by 
observing the pulse and breathing of 255 military recruits stationed at Budapest. He took 
great pains to ensure normal conditions and homogeneous data ; thus all his men were aged 
20 to 24 years. Any observation taken on a man found to have a not perfectly healthy heart 
was rejected ; the observations were invariably taken in the early morning soon after the men 
were wakened and whilst they were still in a position of rest. Further, they were all taken at 
the same time of the year, the end of September and the beginning of October. 
The following tables are given. Table I, a correlation table of Pulse classified according to 
Stature, and Table II, a correlation table of Breathing classified according to Stature. Dr Korosy 
calculates the mean of the Pulse and Breathing frequencies for each array corresponding to 
a given stature, and finds that there is no systematic reduction in these means as the stature 
increases. From this fact he deduces that there is no relation between Pulse and Stature or 
Breathing and Stature. It seems however worth while to carry the enquiry a little further 
and measure the degree of relationship more accurately. I have therefore calculated the 
correlation coefficient for each of his tables and find : 
For Pulse and Stature 
?-p.s.= -"072± '042, 
For Breathing and Stature 
r B S = - -042 + -042. 
Thus we find no relationship existing between Breathing and Stature, whilst there appears to 
be a slight tendency to a slower pulse with increasing stature ; we cannot however attach 
much importance to this slight relationship based upon only 253 observations. It is possible 
owing to the courtesy of Dr Korosy, who has kindly provided us with the data represented 
in our Table III, not given in his paper, to obtain the relationship between Pulse and Breathing. 
For Pulse and Breathing 
r= + -108 ±-042, 
or, there is a small if possibly significant relationship between breathing and pulse rates*. 
Dr Korosy also gives graphs of the two frequency distributions for Pulse and Breathing but 
they are unfortunately a little misleading from the fact that he does not bring his curve down to 
the zero base line for the groups which correspond to a zero frequency and thus his distri- 
butions appear more unsymmetrical than they really are. He calculates approximately some 
of the statistical constants characteristic of the two distributions, and again we have carried his 
work a little further and found the best fitting curves to the two series. 
For the Pulse frequency distribution we find the following constants : 
^,= -r -1765, /3 X = -8587, Mean Pulse = 64-206 per minute, 
fjL 2 = 4-5012, /3 2 = 5-8368, Standard Deviation = 8-486, 
M3 = -|-8-8494, k =+-2606, Mode is at pulse 61-92. 
^4 = 118-2576, 
* For these 255 cases: mean pulse = 64-200, mean breathing 15-839 ; standard deviation for pulse 
8-588, for breathing 2-349. 
