of prostitutes was that of Dr. Pauline Tarnowsky in Russia (first published in the Vratch in 1887, and afterwards as Etudes anthropometriques sur les Prostituees et les Voleuses).  She examined fifty St. Petersburg prostitutes who had been inmates of a brothel for not less than two years, and also fifty peasant women of, so far as possible, the same age and mental development.  She found that (1) the prostitute showed shorter anterior-posterior and transverse diameters of skull; (2) a proportion equal to eighty-four per cent. showed various signs of physical degeneration (irregular skull, asymmetry of face, anomalies of hard palate, teeth, ears, etc.).  This tendency to anomaly among the prostitutes was to some extent explained when it was found that about four-fifths of them had parents who were habitual drunkards, and nearly one-fifth were the last survivors of large families; such families have been often produced by degenerate parents.

The frequency of hereditary degeneration has been noted by Bonhoeffer among German prostitutes.  He investigated 190 Breslau prostitutes in prison, and therefore of a more abnormal class than ordinary prostitutes, and found that 102 were hereditarily degenerate, and mostly with one or both parents who were drunkards; 53 also showed feeble-mindedness (Zeitschrift fuer die Gesamte Strafwissenschaft, Bd. xxiii, p. 106).

The most detailed examinations of ordinary non-criminal prostitutes, both anthropometrically and as regards the prevalence of anomalies, have been made in Italy, though not on a sufficiently large number of subjects to yield absolutely decisive results.  Thus Fornasari made a detailed examination of sixty prostitutes belonging chiefly to Emilia and Venice, and also of twenty-seven others belonging to Bologna, the latter group being compared with a third group of twenty normal women belonging to Bologna (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1892, fasc.  VI).  The prostitutes were found to be of lower type than the normal individuals, having smaller heads and larger faces.  As the author himself points out, his subjects were not sufficiently numerous to justify far-reaching generalizations, but it may be worth while to summarize some of his results.  At equal heights the prostitutes showed greater weight; at equal ages they were of shorter stature than other women, not only of well-to-do, but of the poor class:  height of face, bi-zygomatic diameter (though not the distance between zygomas), the distance from chin to external auditory meatus, and the size of the jaw were all greater in the prostitutes; the hands were longer and broader, compared to the palm, than in ordinary women; the foot also was longer in prostitutes, and the thigh, as compared to the calf, was larger.  It is noteworthy that in most particulars, and especially in regard to head measurements, the variations were much greater among the prostitutes than among the other women