A laboratory manual of anthropometry / by Harris H. Wilder.

  • Harris Hawthorne Wilder
Date:
[1920]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A laboratory manual of anthropometry / by Harris H. Wilder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/216 page 1
    INTRODUCTION THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE SCIENCE OF ANTHROPOMETRY When White in 1794, basing his assertions upon the observation of both skeletons and living men, made the statement that the forearm of negroes, in proportion to the upper arm, was longer than in white men, he inaugurated the science of Comparative Racial Anthropometry, and showed that there were constant differences in the bodily proportions of the various human races. Differences of this sort seem to have been unrecognized before this, even by artists and sculptors, who, although from the time of the Egyptian and Assyrian carvings had elaborated and even emphasized the racial characters of face and head, had given no heed to differences in the other parts of the body. It is thus quite pos- sible that the classic sculptors of Greece and Rome may have used indif- ferently as models their own people and their foreign slaves, which may serve to verify and explain the asserted negroid proportions of the Apollo Belvidere.* The assertion of White was an advance upon new ground, and although it was accompanied by neither detailed measurements, calcula- tion of averages, or indices, it was yet of great value in the development of the subject. After this, however, the work rested for forty-four years, when Humphrey, in 1838, made careful measurements, not only of humerus and radius, but of femur and tibia also, in twenty-five skeletons of negroes and the same number of those of white men. He compared each individual length with the total height of the skeleton from which it came, taken as 100, and thus obtained indices which could be directly compared. His results corroborated White regarding the long forearm (radius) of negroes, and found a similar greater length in the lower leg (tibia) of the same race, as compared with the whites. He found, for example, that the average humerus in the two races bore practically the same proportion to the total height, 19.52% in negroes and 19.54% in whites, while the figures for the radius, also expressed in a percentage of the total height, were respectively 15.16% and 14.15%. In the same way the figures for the femur were 27.40 and 27.51, a negligible differ- ence, while those for the tibia were 23.23 and 22.15. But by this time other anthropologists had become interested in racial differences in bodily proportion, and under the critical scrutiny of Broca this subject received still more careful treatment. He pointed * Perhaps a Greek head on a negro body, as has often been asserted.
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