Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 69.djvu/349

Rh know scarcely in any one case, whether differentiation has taken place by direct selection of few or of many organs. When once such measurements are forthcoming we shall have firmer ground to go upon, and the processes of the present memoir seem to suggest how in the future we shall be able to link together quantitatively local races, and possibly at a more remote date obtain quantitative conceptions of the stages of evolutionary descent itself.

(1.) The collection and reduction of the material on which this pre- liminary notice is based were due to co-operative labour. Our aim was to ascertain which, if any, physical characters are sensibly corre- lated with intellectual ability. With this end in view we obtained leave from the Cambridge Anthropometric Committee to freely use their valuable series of measurements on Cambridge undergraduates. Our object was to discover whether these measurements had any rela- tionship to the character of the degrees afterwards obtained by the measured. In order to do this it was necessary to copy the names of the persons measured, and ascertain what WHS the nature of the degrees ultimately obtained by them. The work of copying the names and colleges of the measured was first undertaken by Miss Mildred E. Barwell, of Girton College, and on her leaving Cambridge was con- tinued arid completed by Miss M. Beeton, of the same college. Miss Beeton prepared cards giving the name, college, and chief physical measurements of upwards of a thousand Cambridge undergraduates. This work was very laborious, and considerably increased by the number of duplicates which had to be discarded.* The next stage was to get the subject, place, and character of the degree ultimately taken by the measured placed upon the cards. The labour of tracing each individual in the publications of the University would have been

the accuracy of the measurer by repeating the process as often as possible, and subjecting him to various artifices. One senior wrangler was measured no less than five times ! Considering that the measurer had not the means of a prison warder for controlling his subject, he appears to have managed fairly well. When the duplicates were hopelessly irreconcilable generally in those characters depending upon the agency of the subject they were all rejected. In other cases where the differences were slight, the first measurements were taken as representative, and the later cards thrown out.
 * There seems to have been a desire on the part of some of the measured to test