Consequently, it is not possible to speak of direct transmission of characters.
Therefore, we must interpret an excessive length of arm, or an excessive shortness, after the same fashion, namely, in its relation to the type of stature, or to the established canons of the form—in other words, as a detail of individual human types.
Let us sum up the three canons in the following table:
| Mesatisceles | Brachysceles | Macrosceles |
|---|---|---|
| St = Ts | St > Ts | St < Ts |
| Ss = St/2 | Ss > St/2 | Ss < St/2 |
| Ct = St/2 | Ct > St/2 | Ct < St/2 |
| W = K(St-1 m.) | W > K(St-1 m.) | W < K(St-1 m.) |
From these measurements are derived certain types of individuality which we may now describe in detail.
The brachyscelous type has an excess of bust, consequently a preponderance of vegetative life; the great development of the abdominal organs tends to make a person of this type a hearty eater, a man addicted to all the pleasures of the table; his big heart, abundantly irrigating the body, keeps his complexion constantly highly coloured, if not plethoric. We can almost see this man of big paunch, corpulent, with an ample chest, fat, ruddy, coarse, and jolly; an excess of nutriment and of blood-supply are favourable to the ready accumulation of adipose tissue, and as the body constantly grows heavier it steadily becomes more difficult for the undersized legs to support it; so that inevitably this man will tend to become sedentary, and he will select a well-spread table as his favourite spot for lingering. Whatever elements of the ideal the world contains, will escape the attention of this type of man, who is far more ready to understand and engage in commerce, which leads by a practical way to the solution of the material problems of life.
In the other type, on the contrary, the macroscelous, the organs of vegetative life are insufficient and the central nervous system is defective. Such a man feels, even though unconsciously, that the abdominal organs are incapable of assimilating sufficient nutriment, and that his lungs, unable to take in the needed quantity of oxygen, render his breathing labourious. His small heart is inadequate for circulating the blood through the whole body, which consequently retains an habitual pallor; while the nervous system is in a constant state of excitation. We can almost see this man, so tall and thin that he seems to be walking on stilts, with pallid, hollow cheeks and narrow chest, suffering from lack of appetite and from melancholia; nervous, incapable of steady productive work and prone to dream over empty visions of poetry and art. The man of this type is quite likely to devote his entire life to a platonic love, or to conceive the idea of crowning an ideal love by committing suicide; and so long as he lives he will never succeed in escaping from the anxieties of a life that has been an economic failure.
It is interesting to examine the types of stature from different points of view: such, for example, as the height of stature, the race, the sex, the age, the social conditions, the pathological deviations, etc.
The Types of Stature According to the Height of the Total Stature.—There exists between the bust and the limbs a primary relation of a mechanical nature, already well known, even before Manouvrier directed the attention of anthropologists to the types of stature. When one individual is very tall and another is very short, the consequence of this fact alone is that the taller of the two has much longer limbs as compared with the shorter. This is because, according to the general laws of mechanics, the bust grows less than the limbs and is subject to less variation.
But notwithstanding this general fact, other conditions intervene to determine the comparative relations between the two portions of the stature. Indeed, Manouvrier exhibits, within his own school, specimens of equal stature but of different types; and furthermore, he notes that the inhabitants of Polynesia are of tall stature and have a long bust, while negroes, who are also of tall stature, have a short bust.