S. Hansen.Biology and Eugenics.23
ON THE INCREASE OF STATURE IN CERTAIN EUROPEAN
POPULATIONS.
By Soren Hansen, M.D.,
Director of the Danish Anthropological Survey, Copenhagen.
If Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may
improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physic
ally or mentally, it must be one of the first objects of Eugenics to take
account of the agencies, under social control or not, that have already
improved or impaired the racial qualities of the present generation. In
many European populations the most obvious racial quality of all, the
stature, has in the last fifty years or more undergone a very sensible im
provement, having increased by as much as five centimetres, and even more.
This improvement is generally ascribed simply to an improvement of the
hygienic and economic conditions, but the question is intricate. The various
populations are built up of a different number of racial elements, more or
less well-defined, but always struggling for the supremacy. The social
selection of individuals suitable for town life may have altered in many
places the physical average of the rural population and veiled the increase,
that has really taken place, exaggerating on the other side the real increase
of stature in the towns. The rapidly falling death-rate has, beyond doubt,
played a part, although it is rather difficult to point out in what way.
It is far from my intention to endeavour to give a complete scrutiny
of the agencies that may have influenced the growth of man in this last
half century. I only wish to call attention to the study of this most inter
esting question in presenting some old and new facts, partly from the
literature and partly from my own studies. The inter-departmental Com
mittee on physical deterioration, which brought together a vast amount of
evidence concerning the physical condition of the present British people,
did not succeed in elucidating the question of the increase in height. The
Committee had only at disposal four cases in which a comparison between
measurements from different periods was possible, and the result was con
tradictory, or at all events, uncertain. Only in one case was a real and
undoubted increase of height established, the boys at Marlborough College,
from 14 to 15 years old, having increased from 61.40 inches in 1874-78 to
61.96 inches in 1899-1902. This increase of 0.56 inches, or 1.42 centi
metres in 25 years is by no means exceptional, but there are some reasons
for believing that the improvement did not commence much before this
period. The final Report of the Anthropometric Committee appointed by the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1875, and submitting
the Report in 1883, contains a table (XXIV.) showing the average stature
and weight of factory children at an interval of 40 years, and another
