Form and Types of Stature
The Form.—Fundamental Cannons regarding the Form.—Types of Stature, Macroscelia and Brachyscelia; their physiological Significance.—Types of Stature in relation to Race, Sex, and Age.
A few years ago, when anthropology first began to be studied, the skull was taken as the point of departure; because in the analytical study of the human body it represents the principal part. Indeed, the same thing was done by Lombroso, when he applied anthropology to the practice of psychiatry and later to the study of criminals. It is a matter of fact that degenerative stigmata of the gravest significance are to be found associated with the skull; and this he could not fail to take into account, because of its bearings upon criminal anthropology.
But to-day anthropology is reaching out into vaster fields of science and striving to develop in diverse directions, such as those of physiology and pathology; and revolting from the collection of degenerative details, it undertakes to study normal man in regard to his external form as related to his functional capacity, or else the man of abnormal constitution, who in his outward form reveals certain predispositions to illness; and starting on these lines, it proposes to investigate principally the metamorphoses of growth, through the successive periods of life.
From this new point of view, it is not any single malformation, but the individual as a whole in the exercise of his functions, who assumes first importance. The study of the cranium (formerly so important as to be the basis of a special science, craniology), becomes only one detail of the whole. As a matter of fact, the brain, which is what gives the cranium its importance, is not only the immediate organ of intelligence, but it is also the psychomotor organ; and as such exercises control over all the striped muscles, and is morphologically associated with the development and the functional powers of the whole body.
It follows that, the larger the body, the bigger brain it needs to control it, independently of the question of intelligence. Therefore the first point of departure should be eminently synthetic, and should include the morphological personality considered as a whole.
One of the properties of living bodies is that of attaining a determinate development, whose limits, both in regard to the quantity of its mass and the harmony of its form, are defined by that biological final cause which is implanted in the race and transmitted by heredity. Consequently every living creature has determinate limits: and these constitute a fundamental biological property.
The causality of such limits has not yet been determined by scientific research; nevertheless it is a phenomenon over which we must pause to meditate. If the philosopher pauses to contemplate the immensity of the ocean from the sea shore, marvelling that the interminable and impetuous movement of the waves should have such exact and definite limits that it cannot overpass by so much as a metre the extreme high-water line upon the beach, we may similarly pause to meditate upon the material limits that life assumes in its infinitely varied manifestations.
From the microbe to the mammal, from the lichen to the palm, all living creatures have inherited these limits, which permit the zoologist and the botanist to assign to each a measure as one of its descriptive attributes.
This is the first attribute which we must take into consideration in the study of anthropology: namely, the mass of the body, and together with the mass, its morphological entirety. The Italian vocabulary lacks any one word which quite expresses this idea, [and in this respect English is scarcely more fortunate[7]]. The stature which represents to us the most synthetic measure of the body in its entirety (a measure determined by the vertical linear distance between the level on which the individual's feet are placed, up to the top of his head as he stands erect), does not represent the entire body in the sense above indicated. It may rather be considered as a linear index of this entirety. The French language, on the contrary, possesses the word taille, which may be rendered in Italian by the word taglia [and in English by the word form[8]], provided that we understand it to signify the conception of the whole morphological personality.