Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/152

148 little racial significance, save as an index in decline in other and more vital regards. Tall stature has been sought for in recruiting armies and so have qualities of boldness and dash. The decline in stature can be measured; the other qualities can not, but we may fairly assume that all soldierly traits have suffered together and the measure of the one serves in some degree as the measure of all.

France has kept for over a century an interesting set of official records which offers most valuable data for the scrutiny of the biologic student of war. They are the records of the physical examination of all the male youths of France as these youths reach their twentieth year of age, and offer themselves, compulsorily, for conscription. To determine who realize the condition of minimum height, weight, chest measurement, and the freedom from infirmity and disease necessary for actual service, all are examined and the results recorded. These records show, therefore, for each year very clearly and precisely the physical status of the new generation of Frenchmen.

The minimum physical condition for actual enlistment has varied much with the varying needs of the nation for men of war. In certain warring periods of her history France has had to drain to the very limit her resources in men able to bear arms. Most notably this condition obtained during the nearly continuous twenty-year period of the Napoleonic Wars.

Louis XIV. in 1701 fixed the minimum height of soldiers at 1,624 mm. But Napoleon reduced it in 1799 to 1,598 mm. (an inch lower) and in 1804 he lowered it two inches further, namely to 1,544 mm. It remained at this figure until the Restoration, when (1818) it was raised by an inch and a quarter, that is, to 1,570 mm. In 1830, at the time of the war with Spain, it was lowered again to 1,540 mm., and finally, in 1832 again raised to 1,560 mm. Napoleon had also to reduce the figure of minimum age.

The death list, both in actual numbers and in percentage of all men called to the colors, during the long and terrible wars of the Revolution and Empire, was enormous. And the actual results in racial modification due to the removal from the breeding population of France of its able-bodied male youth, leaving its feeble-bodied youth and senescent maturity at home to be the fathers of the new generation, is plainly visible in the condition of the conscripts of later years.

From the recruiting statistics, as officially recorded, it may be stated with confidence that the average height of the men of France began notably to decrease with the coming of age in 1813 and on, of the young men born in the years of the Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and that it continued to decrease in the following years with the coming of age of youths born during the Wars of the Empire. Soon after the cessation of these terrible man-draining wars, for the maintenance of which a great part of the able-bodied male population of France had been withdrawn from their families and the duties of reproduction, and much of this part actually sacrificed, a new type of boys began to be born, boys that had in them an inheritance of stature that carried them by the time of their coming of age in the late 1830's and 40's to a height an inch greater than that of the earlier generations born in war time. The average height of the annual conscription contingent born during the Napoleonic Wars was about 1,625 mm.; of those born after the war it was about 1,655 mm.

The fluctuation of the height of the young men of France had as obvious result a steady increase and later decrease in the number of conscripts exempted in successive wars from military service because of undersize. Immediately after the Restoration, when the minimum height standard was raised from 1,544 mm. to 1,570 mm., certain French departments were quite unable