A laboratory manual of anthropometry

Preface

It has long been a reproach to American science that now, for many years, the branch of Physical Anthropology has been so little cultivated, and this the more because of our early prestige in this very field and because of our unrivalled opportunities.

When Morton, in 1839, published his Crania Americana, and followed this in 1844 by a similar work, the Crania Aegyptiaca, he gave the United States a leading place in the then new science of Craniology, but now after eighty years, in this and in related fields, American names are as rare in bibliographies as American merchant ships have been until recently upon the high seas. With the vast possibilities for ethnological study furnished by our aborigines, with the importation in the past of large numbers of negroes from Africa, which are now numbered by millions, and with the hordes of alien peoples from all parts of the world, who seek a foothold in the still new continent, not even Rome herself, in Imperial times, could supply such enormous ethnological material, yet the advantages taken of such opportunities have been but slight. Every large European power, and at least one Asiatic one (Japan), has surpassed the United States in Anthropometric work. In this line of Anthropometry, or Biometric Ethnology, especially, unheeded by and almost unknown to, American science, a great body of facts has been compiled in Europe, the facts being obtained by means of European instruments, collected by. means of European technical methods, and rendered significant by means of European scholarship.

Some twenty years ago the growing need of unifying the technical measurements, at least those most commonly employed, became more and more apparent, and led to the adoption of a set of prescriptions governing the more important measurements of the skull, and of the head and facial features in the living. This was established at the meeting of 1906 of the International Congress of Anthropologists, held at Monaco, and the Committee consisted of representatives of France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, but neither England nor America. The official report was in French by the Secretary, M. Papillault, and was published in the periodical L'Anthropologie. The movement towards a standardization of measurements excited a continually increasing interest, and its next official manifestation came at the Congress of the same body in 1912, meeting at Geneva. The Committee which prepared this report was a larger one (24 members), and included, beside the countries represented at the former one, Spain, Russia, Great Britain, Russian Poland, Hungary and the United States. This second report consisted of standardized

VI PREFACE

measurements ot the living body, exclusive of the head and face, which had been treated in 1906, and was published officially in four languages, French, German, Italian, and English, but the periodicals in which these reports appeared were exclusively European, and the first American reprinting was during the present year (1919), when the reports of both Congresses appeared in our new Journal of Physical Anthropology, whose serial date (Vol. II) suggests the previous years of neglect of this science in our country.

It was with a view to directing a broader American attention to this vitally important branch of Anthropology that the present author, sometime previous to 1912, drew up, based largely upon the prescription of 1906, a set of rules for the guidance of the laboratory student, principally along the line of craniometry, and this manuscript was worked over by his advanced students and himself, accompanying the actual measurement of skulls. The appearance of the second set of rules, the prescription of 1912, enabled him to add the authoritative rules for the principal measurements of the living body. Thus the work, tested in the laboratory by practical application, assumed somewhere near its present form.

The granting of a Sabbatical leave in 1913 by the Trustees of Smith College enabled the author to visit several of the European laboratories, where he had the opportunity of inspecting the practical anthropometric work carried on by some of the leading investigators in this field. He here takes this opportunity of expressing his sincere thanks to them all, who, in the midst of a busy term, found time to demonstrate to him their equipment and especially their personal technical methods by actual measurements. These include Prof. Fabio Frassetto in Bologna, Prof. Otto Schlaginhaufen, the pupil and successor of Prof. Rudolf Martin in Zurich, and especially Prof. Eugen Fischer in Freiburg in Breisgau, in whose anthropological laboratory he spent several weeks.

In 1914 appeared the long-awaited book of Prof. Martin, the "Lehrbuch der Anthropologic, " only a few months before the bursting of the storm-cloud of a well-nigh universal World War, since which communication between the anthropologists of the two hemispheres became, for four years, all but interrupted. At best, however, this exhaustive text-book as it is large and expensive, and in the German language, is more or less impractical for the average American student, and while of the greatest value to specialists, it does not fill the needs of American Colleges and Universities, at least so far as undergraduates are concerned. These conditions caused the decision to publish the present volume, which has again been thoroughly revised, and is now offered in a somewhat simplified form. It consists primarily of the rules for measurements given in the two prescriptions of 1906 and 1912, and adds for the convenience of the student certain of the most useful indices. An enumeration of instruments, as employed in various places, is given in the introduction, together with a much simplified account of the most generally used mathe-

PREFACE Vll

matical methods employed in tabulating and expressing the results of measurements, for the especial benefit of that large class of students who find their chief interest in the morphological relations of the subjects treated, but whose mathematical ability is not great, and who are not able readily to follow the more abstruse methods and expositions of them made use of by biometricians.

The student is introduced to the bibliography of the subject by a series of footnotes, which are found under each heading, and are intended to guide him to certain of the most important papers, generally the ones especially followed in this book. From the bibliographies given here, in their turn, a more complete knowledge of the literature may be obtained.

The main work is followed by two appendices, the one (A) giving the actual measurements of 93 skulls and skull fragments of Indians from Southern New England, the other (B) the bodily proportions of 100 Smith College Students, both sets of measurements the result of work carried out in the Smith College Anthropological Laboratory by graduate students. These may prove useful as samples of the kind of work treated in this manual, and will be of interest to use in comparison with the results of the practical reader.

Smith College Anthropological Laboratory, Northampton, Mass.

Table Of Contents

Page

Historical Development of Anthropometry 1

Anthropometrical Instruments ' 8

Part I. Osteometry; the Measurement of the Bones, Including the Skull

I. The Skull 33-149

Orientation 35

Landmarks 40

Measurements 48

Indices 62

II. The Vertebral Column, with the Ribs and Sternum 76

III. Shoulder-girdle 80

Scapula 80

Clavicle 83

IV. Arm and Hand . 84

Humerus 84

Ulna 88

The Bones of the Hand 105

V. The Pel vie Skeleton, including Hip-girdle and Sacrum 109

Pelvic Girdle 109

Sacrum 116

VI. The Bones of the Leg and Foot .■ ..122

Femur 122

Patella 129

Tibia 130

Fibula 136

The loot Skeleton in General 136

Talus 137

Calcaneus . . . 140

The Other Tarsal Bones .....' 142

The Metacarpals and Phalanges 143

Intermembral Indices • 144

Relation of the lengths of Limb bones to Stature 147

ix

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