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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.This article reports on a collaborative project which is investigating the usefulness of data on height for the analysis of the impact of long-term changes in nutritional status and health on economic, social, and demographic behavior. In this project, measures of height are used for two related purposes. First, mean height at specific ages is used as a measure of the standard of living. When used in this way, data on height supplement other evidence, such as indexes of real wages, estimates of per capita income, and measures of food consumption. One

Summary One of the truly significant contributions to practical demography is the procedure developed by William Brass for estimating life-table values from minimal data obtained in fertility surveys. Specifically, Brass designed a set of factors dependent on the shape of the fertility schedule, which convert proportions of children dead of women in standard age intervals into life table q(x)-values. Jeremiah Sullivan recently presented in this journal a method for simplifying the calculations involved in obtaining the multiplying factor in the Brass procedure. Both Brass and Sullivan employed restrictive fertility schedules to obtain their multiplying factors, and a rigorous test of either model has been hampered by the lack of numerous adequately recorded fertility schedules, especially those which begin early. Recently, a set of model fertility schedules which adequately duplicates empirical fertility schedules has been developed. These schedules were used to test the Brass and Sullivan procedures and to obtain new estimates of multiplying factors. Although the Brass and Sullivan procedures are shown to produce good estimators, new estimators, which prove superior to either, are developed and analysed.

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