Anthropometric examinations of supposedly healthy children or of those brought to the physician because of illness show wide variations in individual children from the so-called standards of height, weight and maturity which are in common use. Not only may a child be advanced or retarded in growth and development as a whole, but the various components often vary so that the individual child may be, for example, of standard height, markedly deficient in weight and advanced in maturity. Evidently growth in height, increase in weight and advance in maturity, while integrated in the growing organism, require either different types or different degrees of interference to alter their rates of progress.
The standards for comparison as pointed out in the publications of the White House Conference1 are by no means exact when applied to any child, as they represent a mean for each measurement, determined on children who may be