Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/333

Rh that results from it that the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic races, and the northern and eastern French, owe their size and strength. As the climate grows warm, and the summer heat becomes excessive, nutrition becomes less active and the mean stature of the population decreases: Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece are examples of this. The influence of climate upon stature is therefore a question of faculty of assimilation and of the quantity of available food. For this last reason, the fertility of the soil has a considerable influence upon the size of the population. A well-cultivated country, furnishing abundance of food and cattle, permits its population to acquire a much greater size, strength, and robustness than would be possible to a population living on infertile lands insufficiently supporting its inhabitants. By the same influences members of families in easy circumstances, and standing in the position of old proprietors, are usually heartier than poorer families; the inhabitants of towns than those of the surrounding rural districts.



Famines and frequent or prolonged dearths have the effect of reducing the size of the peoples who are exposed to them. Wars induce the same result, and this not only by the operation of the material disasters and miseries which they occasion, but also through the loss of a large number of the most vigorous and robust men of the nation,