The growth of children / by H.P. Bowditch.

  • Bowditch, H. P. (Henry Pickering), 1840-1911.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The growth of children / by H.P. Bowditch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    30/124
    metrical investigations, the female sex seems to have beer strangely neglected, though, in all questions relating to th( growth and development of the race, its importance is at least equal to that of the male sex. The only accessible obscrvationf; on girls, except those of Quetelet, seem to have been made ir: Great Britain. Quetelet himself quotes * the following obser- vations made by Cowell among the lower classes of the popula- tion of Manchester and Stockport, by which it appears that the relative size of the two sexes varies very much, as in this com- munity. The curves on Plate V. show the rate of growth oi the factory operatives of both sexes, the values of the ordi- nates being taken from the above tables. It will be seen that these curves, though rather irregular, owing to the small num- ber of observations from which they are constructed, are very different in their character from those given by Quetelet; a discrepancy to which this author, however, does not allude. Through the kindness of Mr. C. Roberts of London, the writer has obtained manuscript tables showing the height and weight of children, of both sexes, in various classes of the community. From these records, it is evident that in Eng- land girls of 13 years of age are, as a rule, taller and heavier than boys of the same age. It must, therefore, be assumed either that children in Belgium grow in accordance with a different law from that which is found to prevail in England and with us, or that Quetelet's tables and curves do not truly represent average heights and weights. A consideration of the method by which Quetelet's results were reached renders the latter assumption not improbable. It will be noticed that Quetelet nowhere gives the number of observations on which his average results are based. He speaks, to be sure, of his investigations having extended over a quarter of a century,f and yet he accounts for the small differences between the maximum and minimum heights for the different ages (aver- ao-inff 17.6 centimeters [6.93 in.l for males, and 19.1 centi- meters [7.52 in.] for females) by the statement that his observations were limited to individuals r^guli^remeut cou- * Sur I'Homme, II. 19 and 51; Original Observations in Parliamentary Reports, 1833, XX., D 1, p. 87. t Anthropometric, p. 178.