Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/32

 24 if heredity means anything, to retain some traces of its relatively degenerate derivation. This is indeed the case. In Dordogne this contingent included nearly seven per cent more deficient statures than the normal average. Quite independently, in the distant department of Herault, Lapouge discovered the same thing. He found in some cantons a decrease of nearly an inch in the average stature of this unfortunate generation, while exemptions for deficiency of stature suddenly rose from six to sixteen per cent. This selection is not, however, entirely maleficent. A fortunate compensation is afforded in another direction. For the generation conceived of the men returned to their families at the close of the war has shown a distinctly upward tendency almost as well marked. Those who survived the perils and privations of service were presumably in many cases the most active and rugged; the weaker portion having succumbed in the meanwhile, either to wounds or sickness. The result was that the generation conceived directly after the war was as much above the average, especially evinced in general physique perhaps more than in stature, as their predecessors, born of war times, were below the normal.

Another illustration of the operation of artificial selection in determining the stature of any given group of men appears in the physique of immigrants to the United States. In the good old days when people emigrated from Europe because they had seriously cast up an account and discovered that they could better their condition in life by coming to America—that is, before the days when they came because they were over-persuaded by steamship agents, eager for the commissions on the sale of tickets, or because of the desire of their home governments to be rid of them—in those days investigation revealed that on the average the immigrants were physically taller than the people from whom they sprang. This difference, in some instances, amounted to upward of an inch upon the average. Among the Scotch, a difference of nearly two inches was shown to exist by the measurements taken during our civil war. These immigrants were a picked lot of men—picked, because it required all the courage which physical vigor could give to pull up stakes and start life anew. This law that natural emigrants, if I may use the term, are taller than the stay-at-home average was again exemplified during the civil war in another way. It was found that recruits hailing from States other than those in which they were born were generally taller than those who had always remained in the