Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/209

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to grow quite so fast at first. We see here sixteen instead of over seventeen per cent, as the initial value, but the general character of the drop is the same, enormously rapid at first and very slow afterwards. All of our cases, then, show the same fundamental phenomena appearing with different values.

Now in regard to man, we do not possess any such adequate series of statistics of growth as is desirable. We have many records of the weight of babies, by which I mean children from the date of birth up to' one year of age. We have also very numerous records of school children, which will extend perhaps from five and one half up to say seventeen, eighteen or even nineteen years. There are records of boys