374 Life and Letters of Francis Galton
appears to be an ingenious instrument for measuring delicacy of touch on the principle of the Roberval balance on p. 212. "The action of the instrument seems perfect, but it exists as yet only as a working model." I do not know whether any further account was published of it, nor how it exactly functioned physiologically.
There are two Appendices to the paper; the first contains chiefly extracts from the Exhibition pamphlet already discussed. The second indicates the methods Galton was using for the reduction of his material, and gives a certain number of his results'. In this Appendix he says that he is prepared to admit that the persons who applied to be measured were not possibly a random sample of those who attended the Exhibition, nor the crowd who visited the Exhibition a random sample of the British population, but he considers that such a criticism must not be pushed unreasonably far. Probably the data afford materials for testing the relations between various bodily faculties, and the influence of occupation and birthplace. Although in this paper he is dealing chiefly with statical anthropometric charactersi.e. those of least interest-such treatment was a necessary preliminary to further discussion and served to exemplify Galton's method of the statistical scale, i.e. the use of percentiles. He considered-and at that time he was justified in considering-that he was
"presenting in a compact and methodical form a great deal more concerning the distribution of the measurements of man than has hitherto been attempted in a numerical form." (p. 275.)
Galton deals only with adult males and adult females, of whom there were 4726 of the former and 1657 of the latter.
His first table gives the maximum or highest records among these adult cases for seven characters.
|
Character |
Highest Record |
| |
|
| |
4726 Adult Males |
1657 Adult Females |
|
Stature without shoes ... |
6 ft. 7.5 in. |
5 ft. 10.3 in. |
|
Weight ... ... ... |
22 st. 0 lbs. |
15 st. 8 lbs. |
|
Vital Capacity ... ... |
354 in.3 |
270 in.3 |
|
Strength of Pull ... ... |
148 lbs. |
89 lbs. |
|
Strength of Squeeze ... |
112 lbs. |
86 lbs. |
|
Swiftness of Blow ... |
29 ft. per sec. |
20 ft. per sec. |
|
Keenness of Sight, distance |
39 in. |
40 in. |
|
of reading diamond type |
I |
|
In all characters but sight the male had a higher record, and if we deal with the median values even there the male is higher than the female. Galton concludes that
"the female differs from the male more conspicuously in strength than in any other particular, and therefore that the commonly used epithet of 'the weaker sex' is appropriate." (p. 278.)
The lady, however, -who could give a squeeze of 86 lbs.$ is not to be despised,
1 See "Some Results of the Anthropometric Laboratory," J. A. I. Vol. xiv, pp. 275-87. a This is slightly in excess of the squeeze of the median adult male. Galton remarks that
