EconlibThe LibraryOther Sites |
Front Page  Titles (by Subject) CHAPTER II: NUTRITION AND EVOLUTION - The Comedy of Protection
Return to Title Page for The Comedy of ProtectionThe Online Library of LibertyA project of Liberty Fund, Inc.Search this Title:Also in the Library:
CHAPTER II: NUTRITION AND EVOLUTION - Yves Guyot, The Comedy of Protection [1906]Edition used:The Comedy of Protection, trans. M.A. Hamilton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906).
About Liberty Fund:Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. Copyright information:The text is in the public domain. Fair use statement:This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit.
CHAPTER IINUTRITION AND EVOLUTIONM. Niceforo’s observations—Children of poor and well-to-do parents—Black spots of Limousin and Brittany. All experience proves the validity of Dr. Gaétan Delaunay’s axiom, “Evolution advances with nutrition, pari passu.” M. Alfred Niceforo, a professor at the University of Lausanne, in a well-to-do neighbourhood, stated from his inspection of the schools that children insufficiently nourished were physically inferior. He published his results in a book called “The Poorer Classes,” in which from a comparison of groups of children from the working classes with groups taken from the well-to-do children in the Lausanne schools he extracted the following results:
M. Niceforo applied the dynamometer ten times in succession to ten poor and ten well-to-do children with a minute’s interval between.
Thus poor children not only have less energy to start with; they also have a less power of resistance to fatigue; at the tenth series where the well-off children lost 36 per cent. they lost 62 per cent. Masons work in the open air, and they are employed in muscular exercise; à priori the hereditary strength of their children should be greater than that of the children of well-to-do sedentary people who spend their lives in offices. A comparison of fifty masons’ children of nine years of age and fifty children of the same age of men of comfortable circumstances engaged in the liberal professions, gives the following results:—
Niceforo’s inquiries confirm the earlier results of Quételet, Broca, and Manouvrier, into the heights of the dwellers in the different districts of Paris. Dr. Collignon calls the zone separating Limousin from Périgord, in which all the people are much below the average in height, “black Limousin,” on the analogy of Broca’s “black Brittany.” This smallness is not racial, for the three principal races of France mix there, and are alike arrested in their development; it is due to poverty. Roberts’ “Manual of Anthropology” (1878) gives the height of 10,000 Englishmen; the height of the aristocracy and the liberal professions is 5 ft. 9 in. at twenty, and 5 ft. 91/2 in. at sixty-nine, while that of the town artisan is 5 ft. 7 in. Those legislators who establish Customs duties in the interest of a small class thereby reduce the food of their countrymen, and condemn numbers of them to stagnation, deterioration, and a premature death. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
