Edouard Mallet's early and almost forgotten study of the average height of Genevan conscripts in 1835.

In 1835, Edouard Mallet published a notable but today nearly forgotten study of the average height of Genevan conscripts. His individual data included 3029 conscripts born between 1805 and 1814, examined and measured between 1826 and 1835. Mallet's work was only the third auxological study to be based on a large sample of individual conscript data, the other two being those of Louis-René Villermé and Adolphe Quetelet, but as far as we know Mallet's was the first to note the law of normal distribution. Like Villermé and Quetelet, Mallet explained urban/rural and international differences in average height strictly in terms of environmental and economic determinants. In the recent past, references to Mallet's work have been rare, and limited to citations of his computed averages. We postulate that Mallet and his study deserve greater consideration for their contribution to the field of anthropometric history than they have yet received. 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.