It has been suggested that Bertillion Record be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

Anthropometry demonstrated in an exhibit from a 1921 eugenics conference.

Anthropometry (Greek ανθρωπος, man, and μετρον, measure, literally meaning "measurement of humans"), in physical anthropology, refers to the measurement of living human individuals for the purposes of understanding human physical variation. Image File history File links Please see the file description page for further information. ... In Paris, Alphonse Bertillon developed an early form of police classification called Bertillonage. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution: Logo from the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921, depicting it as a tree which unites a variety of different fields. ... Physical anthropology, often called biological anthropology, studies the mechanisms of biological evolution, genetic inheritance, human adaptability and variation, primatology, primate morphology, and the fossil record of human evolution. ...

Bertillon, Galton, and criminology

Illustration from "The Speaking Portrait" (Pearson's Magazine, Vol XI, January to June 1901) demonstrating the principles of Bertillon's anthropometry.

The French savant, Alphonse Bertillon (b. 1853), gave this name in 1883 to a system of identification depending on the unchanging character of certain measurements of parts of the human frame. He found by patient inquiry that several physical features and the dimensions of certain bones or bony structures in the body remain practically constant during adult life. He concluded from this that when these measurements were made and recorded systematically every single individual would be found to be perfectly distinguishable from others. The system was soon adapted to police methods, as the immense value of being able to fix a person's identity was fully realized, both in preventing false personation and in bringing home to any one charged with an offence his responsibility for previous wrongdoing. "Bertillonage," as it was called, became widely popular, and after its introduction into France in 1883, where it was soon credited with highly gratifying results, was applied to the administration of justice in most civilized countries. England followed tardily, and it was not until 1894 that an investigation of the methods used and results obtained was made by a special committee sent to Paris for the purpose. It reported favourably, especially on the use of the measurements for primary classification, but recommended also the adoption in part of a system of "finger prints" as suggested by Francis Galton, and already practised in Bengal. Download high resolution version (1584x626, 225 KB)Illustration from The Speaking Portrait, an article from Pearsons Magazine, 1901, illustrating the principles of Alphonse Bertillons anthropometry. ... Download high resolution version (1584x626, 225 KB)Illustration from The Speaking Portrait, an article from Pearsons Magazine, 1901, illustrating the principles of Alphonse Bertillons anthropometry. ... Kim Peek is an autistic savant who inspired the character of Charlie Babbitt in the move Rain Man A savant (suh-VAHNT) is a learned person, well versed in literature or science, often with an exceptional skill in a specialized field of learning. ... Illustration from The Speaking Portrait(Pearsons Magazine, Vol XI, January to June 1901) demonstrating the principles of Bertillons anthropometry. ... 1883 (MDCCCLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... 1883 (MDCCCLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... Francis Galton Sir Francis Galton F.R.S. (February 16, 1822 – January 17, 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was a Victorian polymath, British anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. ...

M. Bertillon selected the following five measurements as the basis of his system:

1. head length;
2. head breadth;
3. length of middle finger;
4. of left foot, and
5. of cubit or forearm from the elbow to the extremity of the middle finger.

Each principal heading was further subdivided into three classes of "small," "medium" and "large," and as an increased guarantee height, length of little finger, and the colour of the eye were also recorded. From this great mass of details, soon represented in Paris by the collection of some 100,000 cards, it was possible, proceeding by exhaustion, to sift and sort down the cards till a small bundle of half a dozen produced the combined facts of the measurements of the individual last sought. The whole of the information is easily contained in one cabinet of very ordinary dimensions, and most ingeniously contrived so as to make the most of the space and facilitate the search. The whole of the record is independent of names, and the final identification is by means of the photograph which lies with the individual's card of measurements.

Anthropometrics was first used in the 19th and early 20th century in criminalistics, to identifying criminals by facial characteristics. Francis Galton was a key contributor as well, and it was in showing the redundancy of Bertillon's measurements that he developed the statistical concept of correlation. Bertillon's system originally measured variables he thought were independent—such as forearm length and leg length—but Galton had realized were both the result of a single causal variable (in this case, stature). Forensics or forensic science is the application of science to questions which are of interest to the legal system as well as social sciences such as archaeology. ... Francis Galton Sir Francis Galton F.R.S. (February 16, 1822 – January 17, 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was a Victorian polymath, British anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. ... In probability theory and statistics, correlation, also called correlation coefficient, is a numeric measure of the strength of linear relationship between two random variables. ...

A Bertillon record for Francis Galton, from a visit to Bertillon's laboratory in 1893.

Bertillon's goal was to use anthropometry as a way of identifying recidivists—what we would today call "repeat-offense" criminals. Previously, police could only record general descriptions and names, and criminals were fond of using alternative identities. As such, it was a difficult job to identify whether or not certain individuals arrested were "first offenders" or life-long criminals. Photography of criminals had become commonplace but it had proven ungainly, as there was no coherent way to arrange visually the many thousands of photographs in a fashion which would allow easy use (an officer would have to sort through them all with the hope of finding one). Bertillon's hope was that through the use of measurements of the body, all information about the individual criminal could be reduced to a set of identifying numbers which could be entered into a large filing system. Francis Galton Sir Francis Galton F.R.S. (February 16, 1822 – January 17, 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was a Victorian polymath, British anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. ... Recidivism is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or have been treated or trained to extinguish that behavior. ...

Bertillon also invisioned the system as being organized in such a way that even if the number of measurements was limited the system could drastically reduce the number of potential matches, through an easy system of body parts and characteristics being labeled as "small", "medium", or "large". For example, if the length of the arm was measured and judged to be within the "medium" range, and the size of the foot was known, this would drastically reduce the number of potential records to compare against. With more measurements of hopefully independent variables, a more precise identification could be achieved, which could then be matched against photographic evidence. Certain aspects of this philosophy would also go into Galton's development of fingerprint identification as well. William West A story that some regard as apocryphal circulates about events occurring in the late 19th century when a man was spotted in the incoming prisoner line at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas by a guard who recognized him and thought he was already in the prison...

Anthropometry, however, gradually fell into disfavour, and it has been generally supplanted by the superior system of finger prints. Bertillonage exhibited certain defects which were first brought to light in Bengal. The objections raised were William West A story that some regard as apocryphal circulates about events occurring in the late 19th century when a man was spotted in the incoming prisoner line at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas by a guard who recognized him and thought he was already in the prison...

1. the costliness of the instruments employed and their liability to get out of order;
2. the need for specially instructed measurers, men of superior education;
3. the errors that frequently crept in when carrying out the processes and were all but irremediable.

Measures inaccurately taken, or wrongly read off, could seldom, if ever, be corrected, and these persistent errors defeated all chance of successful search. The process was slow, as it was necessary to repeat it three times so as to arrive at a mean result. In Bengal measurements were already abandoned by 1897, when the finger print system was adopted throughout British India. Three years later England followed suit; and as the result of a fresh inquiry ordered by the Home Office, finger prints were alone relied upon for identification.

Anthropology and anthropometry

A "head-measurer" tool designed for anthropological research in the early 1910s.

During the early 20th century, anthropometry was used extensively by anthropologists in the United States and Europe. One of its primary uses became the attempted differentiation between supposed differences in the races of man, and it was often employed to show ways in which races were supposedly inferior to others. The wide application of intelligence testing also became incorporated into a general anthropometric approach, and many forms of anthropometry were used for the advocacy of eugenics policies. During the 1920s and 1930s, though, members of the school of cultural anthropology of Franz Boas also began to use anthropometric approaches to discredit the concept of fixed biological race. Anthropometric approaches to these types of problems became abandoned in the years after the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, who also famously relied on anthropometric measurements to distinguish "Aryans" from Jews. This school of physical anthropology generally went into decline during the 1940s. The term race distinguishes a population of humans from other populations. ... ... Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution: Logo from the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921, depicting it as a tree which unites a variety of different fields. ... Cultural anthropology, also called social anthropology or socio-cultural anthropology, forms one of four commonly-recognized fields of anthropology, the holistic study of humanity. ... Franz Boas Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 22, 1942) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the Father of American Anthropology. Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. ... Selection at the Auschwitz ramp in 1944, where the Nazis chose whom to kill immediately and whom to use as slave labor or for medical experimentation, such as those of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. ... Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933–1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of the Nazi Party, with the Führer Adolf Hitler as dictator. ... Aryan is an English word derived from the Indian Vedic Sanskrit and Iranian Avestan terms ari-, arya-, ārya-, and/or the extended form aryāna-. The Sanskrit and Old Persian languages both pronounced the word as arya-. Beyond its use as the ethnic self-designation of the Proto-Indo-Iranians...

During the 1940s antropometry was used by William Sheldon when evaluating his somatotypes, according to which characteristics of the body can be translated into characteristics of the mind. He also believed that criminality could be predicted according to the body type. This use of antropometry is today also outdated. Because of his extensive reliance on photographs of nude Ivy League students for his work, Sheldon ran into considerable controversy when his work became public. William Sheldon assinged people to three categories based on their body builds: endomorphic, mesomorphic, and ectomorphic. ... The somatotypes is the core of a theory based on the assumption that different body types are associated with human temperament types, formed during the 1940s by the American psychologist William Sheldon. ... for other uses please see Crime (disambiguation) A crime is an act that violates a political or moral law. ... The Ivy League athletic conference, founded in 1954, consists of eight private institutions of higher education located in the eastern United States. ...

Modern anthropometry and biometrics

Anthropometric studies are today conducted for numerous different purposes. Academic anthropologists investigate the evolutionary significance of differences in body proportion between populations whose ancestors lived in different environmental settings. Human populations exhibit similar climatic variation patterns to other large-bodied mammals, following Bergmann's rule, which states that individuals in cold climates will tend to be larger than ones in warm climates, and Allen's rule, which states that individuals in cold climates will tend to have shorter, stubbier limbs than those in warm climates. On a microevolutionary level, anthropologists use anthropometric variation to reconstruct small-scale population history. For instance, John Relethford's studies of early twentieth-century anthropometric data from Ireland show that the geographical patterning of body proportions still exhibits traces of the invasions by the English and Norse centuries ago. In zoology, Bergmanns Rule is a principle that correlates environmental temperature with body mass in warm-blooded animals. ... Allens rule is a biological rule posited by Joel Asaph Allen in 1877. ...

Outside academia, scientists working for private companies and government agencies conduct anthropometric studies to determine what range of sizes clothing and other items need to be manufactured in. A basically antropometric division of body types into the categories endomorphic, ectomorphic and mesomorphic derived from Sheldon's somatotype theories is today popular among people doing weight training. In human biology and sport sciences, humans are classified according to three body types: People with an ectomorphic body type are naturally thin and lightly build with flat chest and poorly muscled limbs. ... Human bodies can be divided into three types known as somatotypes. ... In human biology and sport sciences, humans are classified according to three body types: People with an ectomorphic body type are naturally thin and lightly build with flat chest and poorly muscled limbs. ... Ectomorphic is one of the three classic somatotypes or body types created by William Sheldon. ... Mesomorphic is one of the three classic somatotypes or body types created by William Sheldon. ... A complete weight training workout can be performed with a pair of adjustable dumbbells and a set of weight disks (plates). ...

Today people are performing anthropometry with three-dimensional scanners. The subject has a three-dimensional scan taken of their body, and the anthropometrist extracts measurements from the scan rather than directly from the individual. This is beneficial for the anthropometrist in that they can use this scan to extract any measurement at any time.

References

• Lombroso, Antropometria di 400 delinquenti (1872)
• Roberts, Manual of Anthropometry (1878)
• Ferri, Studi comparati di antropometria (2 vols., 1881-1882)
• Lombroso, Rughe anomale speciali ai criminali (1890)
• Bertillon, Instructions signalétiques pour l'identification anthropométrique (1893)
• Livi, Anthropometria (Milan, 1900)
• Fürst, Indextabellen zum anthropometrischen Gebrauch (Jena, 1902)
• Report of Home Office Committee on the Best Means of Identifying Habitual Criminals (1893-1894)

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Anthropometry

• Craniometry
• Criminology
• Digit ratio
• Fingerprinting
• Genetic fingerprinting
• Human height
• Human weight
• Osteometry
• Phrenology

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication in the public domain. Image File history File links Commons-logo. ... The Wikimedia Commons (also called Commons or Wikicommons) is a repository of free content images, sound and other multimedia files. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... Criminology is the study of crime as a social phenomenon, including the causes and consequences of crime, criminal behavior, as well as the development of, and impact of laws. ... The digit ratio is the ratio of the lengths of different digits, fingers or toes, typically as measured from the bottom crease where the finger joins the hand to the tip of the finger. ... This article is about human fingerprints. ... Genetic fingerprinting, DNA testing, DNA typing, and DNA profiling are techniques used to distinguish between individuals of the same species using only samples of their DNA. Its invention by Sir Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester was announced in 1985. ... Human height, or stature, is the height of a human being. ... Weight in measuring human body weight in the medical sciences and in sports is a measurement of mass, expressed in units of mass such as kilograms (kg) or pounds (lb). ... Osteometry is the study and measurement of the human skeleton, especially in an anthropological or archaeological context. ... A 19th century Phrenology chart Phrenology (from Greek: φρην, phrÄ“n, mind; and λογος, logos, study) is a theory which claims to be able to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head (reading bumps). Developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall around 1800, and... Encyclopædia Britannica, the 11th edition The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911) is perhaps the most famous edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...

In art Yves Klein termed anthropometries his performance paintings where he covered nude women with paint, and used their bodies as paintbrushes. Untitled blue monochrome in the style of Yves Klein. ...

Resources

Books
Bodyspace - Stephen Pheasant - A classic review of human body sizes.

Websites

• Ergonomics research: Anthropometrics, ergonomic tools, product design, etc.