CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 
241 
used, than those suggested bj previous investigators; and lastly (iv.) that it 
indicates what additional data ought to be sought for, and to some extent what is 
the inner meaning of divergent results, for the great problem of racial differentiation 
by natural selection.* 
Of the general conclusions reached by the author, perhaps two deserve restating 
and emphasising here. In the first place, although there were individual tall men 
among the neolithic ^copulations, whose bones have so far been unearthed, yet neolithic 
man as a whole was short. Of course, it is possible that a tall neolithic type, i.e., one 
with a stature greater than 168 centims. say, may yet be discovered—witness the 
discovery within the last two years of a neolithic dwarf But failing its appearance, 
the question arises, where and how did the tall Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian 
develop ? To what extent is this tallness racial, to what extent due to environment ? 
The apparently greater stature of British over Continental neolithic man deserves 
special consideration from anthropologists. 
Secondly, granting that the modern populations in the same district are taller than 
the neolithic populations, there still appears in both France and Southern Germany 
some regression of the modern stature on that of the ancient Franks, Bajuvars, and 
Allemans. I differ from both PtAHON and Lehmann-Nltsche in considering that the 
difference is too great to he accounted for as a process of natural selection applied to 
the long bones, Rahon has made a slip in his arithmetic, and Lehmann-Nitsche 
compares the Bow Grave population with the most favourable element of Munich 
town recruits. If the divergence could be accounted for by selection applied to the 
bones, why is not a similar divergence to be found in the case of Anglo-Saxons and 
modern English ? I think an explanation must be souglit elsewhere. One suggestion 
is, that as the physical struggle for existence has been lessened, reproductive selection 
has had more play, and the greater fertility^ of an older pre-Germanic element in the 
populations of both Southern Germany and France ha^i led to a return of stature to 
its more ancient value. In the case of Anodo-Saxons and Scandinavians in EnMand 
o o 
there was very probably a more comjfiete destruction of the earlier pojndations. 
Whatever may be the real reason for this apparent degeneration, it seems most 
desirable that there should be a systematic measurement of all long bones dug up 
anywhere in our own country, and this whether they belong to prehistoric or historic 
times. Stature is quite as marked a racial character as cephalic index, or any other 
skull measurement, and its hish correlation with the loner bones admits even in the 
present state of our data of its reconstruction with very considerable accuracy, if only 
a sufficient representation, say twenty to forty long bones, of an ancient population 
has been measured. It is only by the gradual accumulation of such data that we can 
* The influence of directed as distinguislicd. from random selection on size, variation, correlation, and 
regression has been theoretically developed in a memoir not yet published. Having been fully 
discussed in my college lectures of this Session, much of the recent work of my department, like the 
present memoir, touches on it. 
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VOL CXCJI.—A. 
