INTERESTING.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1660, 15 November 1887, Page 3

INTERESTING.

The - distinguished arobcsclogist Q-aneral Pitman (tor long better known as Colonel Line-Pox), has been laying open an ancient British Tilin’# at Woodeulto, which was last week visited by the Boyal Arobieological Society. He there demonstrated to the members, from a number of skeletons found, that the mew did not average sft 2in in height, and the women not more than 4ft lOln. They were: a population of little men and little women, kept little by constant warfare and coarse and insufficient food. A well-known antiquary, Mr W. P. Stanley, has been taking a scries of measurements of various coffins, skeletons, mummies, and other relics of acoient humanity, with a view to ascertaining the average height of the human race in the past. He states be has oolkoted sufficient data to prove that the human race has continuously increased in average stature. His measurement of Roman coffins show that, however great the Homans wore as a nation, they wore nob men of large stature— Macaulay, Horatius, and “the brave days of old '* notwithstanding. Indeed Mr Stanley affirms that the Homans could not have greatly exceeded 6ft Sin. It is ; a feather in the oap of our English aristocracy (says a contemporary) that they appear to have increased in stature generation after generation, but then, they had nothing else to do. And as Mr S'anley extends his investigations into the stature of our English aristocracy over 600 years, of course he has not had many to' experiment upon. Mr Stanley concludes, from his observations that the average itature of the human race increases at about the rate of an inch and a quarter pet 1000 years. Perhaps when the environment is more favorable—or, in other words, when human beings can get four square meals a day (as they can all over Australia), then the young ones are not compelled to wait a 1000 years for an increase of stature. They rua up to 11 cornstalks ” immediately.