Sent from Charles Samuel Myers
8 Aug 1914
Description:

‘Dear Sir,

 

I think it very kind of you to have replied to my letter at such length and so interestingly. I will gladly do all I can to elucidate the special points which bear upon your work. I fear, however, that the conditions, under which my measurements will be made, will exclude me from taking the great number of observations which for many points you require.

The Sultan, if I remember rightly, told me that there were not more than 2000 Egyptians in the Khedive’s army. The only other way of getting material is to measure the natives digging at an exploration-site or to accompany the recruiting-commission when it goes to various villages along the Nile-valley.

I do not know how far these last two methods of anthropometry may afford me the opportunities. I have, therefore, determined to make a series of notes, measurements, & photographs of Egyptian soldiers in greater detail than you appear to consider likely. The max. head-length head-height and auricular height are included in my list. Stature, facial, nasal, orbital, and limit[?] measurements are also in this scheme, also eye, skin and hair-colour; I shall of course note birthplace of subject, & of his parents & also religion. I will do my best to find out, if I can, the relationship between privates of the same villages. It occurs to me that the anthropometry undertaken by the Egyptian Education Department would in this respect be of more likely service. A friend of mine, named Coupland, has measured a great number of pupils in a Cairo school, and noted the increase of their head-measurements (and visual acuity!) from year to year. If you can, when next I see him I will ask him to communicate with you.

You appear to infer that I shall have thirty or forty assistants in my work. Possibly, I may get a servant or clerk from the War Office; but otherwise I know of no one else to help you. I am trying in two different directions to obtain a man to go out & work with me. But such people are rare; and, although I may be able to find sufficient reliable helpers in Cairo, the probability is a small one.

I have one of your head-spanners, also a very superior form of Flower’s callipers invented by [Henry?] Gray. To your head spanner, at my suggestion, Mr. [Horace] Darwin has fixed a graduated circle with swinging index, so that (if the head be kept in a given position) the angle which the auriculo-nasal, auriculo-alveolar and auriculo mental lines make with the vertical can be recorded. I propose rapidly estimating these angles after determining the lengths of the radii by your spanner. With these lengths & their respective angles with the vertical known, the nasion, alveolar point, & chin could be plotted after the fashion of polar co-ordinates.

I am interesting [sic] in limit-measurements particularly as, in a paper to be read by me at the Glasgow meeting of the British Assocn., I shall show how the proportions of the long bones of King Hen Khet [sic] (of the IIIrd dynasty!), relate[?] to one another & to the probable stature, approximate far more nearly to those of Negroid than to those of European skeletons [see C.S. Myers, ‘The Bones of Hen Nekht...’, Man 1 (1901), pp. 152-153].

I should like to read the two papers you offer kindly to send me on the Naqada statures and on the capacity-estimation. My address from mid-September until the middle of October will be

62 Holland Park

London W.

I shall not forget your offer to publish my work, of it prove interesting enough. I hope that your new journal may meet with deserving success.

Yours faithfully,

C.S. Myers.’