Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/254

248 measuring 120 newborn infants of both sexes he found that there was a marked tendency for the males to be larger than the females. 'Hence appears' as he is pleased to put it, 'the merciful dispensations of Providence towards the female sex, for when deviations from the medium standard occur it is remarkable that they are much more frequently below than above this standard.' He considered that the greater mortality of males at and shortly after birth is largely due to the injuries to the head occurring at birth, but also that, since the males are larger and therefore make from the first a larger demand on the nutritive capacity of the mother, they are more likely to suffer from any defect of the mother in this respect. The problem and its possible and probable explanations were thus clearly stated more than a century ago.

As often happens with pioneers, Clarke's little paper was forgotten, and for more than half a century, although a number of workers brought extensive contributions of new data, their attitude was frequently illogical or one-sided, and the progress of scientific knowledge was not great. In 1844 Simpson published a well-known study which brought together a mass of evidence bearing more or less on the question before us. He showed that in male births the mothers suffered excessively as well as the infants; he refused to admit that the greater mortality of males at and shortly after birth could be due to any other cause than the generally recognized larger size of the male head (mainly on the ground that fœtal deaths up to birth are fairly apportioned to the two sexes) and concluded that the greater size of the male head is the cause of a vast annual mortality. A number of later obstetrical inquirers furnished additional contributions to the matter, at one point or another, though not always agreeing that so great a mortality could be due to a difference of size which seemed so small. One authority, indeed, roundly declared that the belief in the larger size of the male head was merely 'a popular prejudice'; this led to fresh measurements, and in this field Stadtfeldt of Copenhagen received credit which really belonged to Clarke of Dublin. Veit showed that even at equal weights more boys than girls die at birth, but, on the other hand, according to Pfannkuch's results, even at equal weights boys' heads are larger than girls'. In any case it certainly seemed probable that the larger size of the male child's head was an important factor in this mortality, and when at length the question began to attract the attention of statistical anthropologists this conclusion was confirmed. The Anthropometric Committee of the British Association, presided over by Mr. Francis Galton, in its final report in 1883 stated its belief that "it would appear that the physical (and most probably the mental) proportions of a race, and their uniformity within certain limits, are largely dependent on