often defective men took place. The result would only be terrible, Dufau
believed, if prolonged; his results, however, were not altogether
reliable, for he failed to note the proportion of men exempted to those
examined. The question was investigated more thoroughly by Tschuriloff
in 1876.[5] He came to the conclusion that the Napoleonic wars had no
great influence on stature, since the regulation height was lowered in
1805, and abolished altogether for healthy men in 1811, and any defect
of height in the next generation is speedily repaired. Tschuriloff
agreed, however, that, though the influence of war in diminishing the
height of the race is unimportant, the influence of war in increasing
physical defects and infirmities in subsequent generations is a very
different matter. He found that the physical deterioration of war
manifested itself chiefly in the children born eight years afterwards,
and therefore in the recruits twenty-eight years after the war. He
regarded it as an undoubted fact that the French army of half a million
men in 1809 increased by 3 per cent. the proportion of hereditarily
infirm persons. He found, moreover, that the new-born of 1814, that is
to say the military class of 1834, showed that infirmities had risen
from 30 per cent. to 45.8 per cent., an increase of 50 per cent. Nor is
the _status quo_ entirely brought back later on, for the bad heredity of
the increased number of defectives tends to be still further propagated,
even though in an attenuated form. As a matter of fact, Tschuriloff
found that the proportion of exemptions from the army for infirmity
increased enormously from 26 per cent. in 1816-17, to 38 per cent. in
1826-27, declining later to 34 per cent. in 1860-64, though he is
careful to point out that this result must not be entirely ascribed to
the reversed selection of wars. There could, however, be no doubt that
most kinds of infirmities became more frequent as a result of military
selection. Lapouge's more recent investigation into the results of the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870 were of similar character; when examining