Association, who have collected and partly classified and published
a large amount of facts, besides having induced several institutions,
such as Marlborough College, to undertake a regular system of
anthropometric record. I am not, however, concerned here with the
labours of this committee, nor with the separate valuable
publications of some of its members, otherwise than in one small
particular which appears to show that the English population as a
whole, or perhaps I should say the urban portion of it, is in some
sense deteriorating. It is that the average stature of the older
persons measured by or for the committee has not been found to
decrease steadily with their age, but sometimes the reverse.[1] This
contradicts observations made on the heights of the same men at
different periods, whose stature after middle age is invariably
reduced by the shrinking of the cartilages. The explanation offered
was that the statistical increase of stature with age should be
ascribed to the survival of the more stalwart. On reconsideration, I
am inclined to doubt the adequacy of the explanation, and partly to
account for the fact by a steady, slight deterioration of stature in
successive years; in the urban population owing to the conditions of
their lives, and in the rural population owing to the continual
draining away of the more stalwart of them to the towns.

It cannot be doubted that town life is harmful to the town population.
I have myself investigated its effect on fertility (see Appendix B),
and found that taking on the one hand a number of rural parishes,
and on the other hand the inhabitants of a medium town, the former
reared, nearly twice as many adult grandchildren as the latter. The
vital functions are so closely related that an inferiority in the
production of healthy children very probably implies a loss of
vigour generally, one sign of which is a diminution of stature.