Abstract
WITHIN the last few years public attention has been drawn to the question of what individuals weigh, by the facilities afforded for weighing by the construction of weighing-chairs. These chairs are not only to be seen at the Crystal Palace, where diminutive boys tout for custom, offering to tell your “correct weight,” but they are also seen at the stations of the Metropolitan Railway and many other places. The practice, therefore, of getting weighed is obviously on the increase, and we want to utilise the knowledge thus gained by showing how it may be turned to most advantage. It will be easily seen that to know the weight of a person without reference to some other standard, such as height, would be of little advantage. But if by taking the height of a person we can say what he ought to weigh, then we have a means of ascertaining what persons ought or ought not to weigh. The difficulty on this subject has been to determine what a man of a certain height really ought to weigh. If this can be determined, then we can say whether a man of a certain height exceeds or falls short of the average weight of men of his stature.
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Lankester, E. Height and Weight. Nature 2, 230–232 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/002230a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/002230a0