Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/255

Rh the size of the female pelvis, which acts as a gauge, as it were, of the race, and eliminates the largest infants, especially those with large heads (and presumably more brains), by preventing their survival at birth."

It must be added, however, that no direct and final demonstration has been brought forward of the tendency to the elimination of the males (or even infants independently of sex) of the greatest weight or those having the largest heads. For this we require to compare male and female stillborn infants at full term with those who are born living and which subsequently survived for at least a week (a longer period would be more desirable but difficult to secure). Such measurements are not to be found in medical literature, so far as I can discover; at the most we find averages, which are meaningless from the present point of view. I applied to obstetrical and anatomical authorities in various countries and received a number of interesting letters and data, including series of entries from the registers of maternity hospitals. But none of the series so far received contains a sufficient number of stillborn children. So far as they go, they are confirmatory of the belief that it is more especially the large children that are eliminated by the selection of birth. The largest series (with 60 stillborn male babies and 50 stillborn females), for which I am indebted to Dr. C. M. Green, of the Boston Lying-in Hospital, shows that among the stillborn of either sex the range of variation is greater than among the living of the same sex, the absolute range of variation being not only greater as compared with the living babies of the same sex, but there being a greater piling up at each end in the case of the stillborn. The data do not suffice to indicate that there is a greater mortality of the largest sized males than of the largest sized females, when we compare the stillborn with the living of the same sex and weight. Another series, more elaborate in its details but still smaller in number as regards the stillborn—for which I am indebted to Professor Whitridge Williams, of Johns Hopkins Hospital—leads to a similarly incomplete conclusion. I still await more extensive data which have been promised me from a British source.

There is, however, another test which, while it can by no means be put forward as having any statistical validity, yet furnishes a highly significant indication in this matter. Just as on the psychic side certain very rare individuals appear in the world whose intellectual capacity enormously excels that of their fellows, so, corresponding to