Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, August 1899: Volume LVVarious
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, August 1899: Volume LV
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
The conclusion I have thus drawn from anthropological data receives
remarkable confirmation from the results of an inquiry I made on the
Comparative Distribution of Jewish Ability, and contributed to the
Anthropological Institute in 1886. Applying the methods of Galton, I
compared the celebrities produced by the Jewish race during the last
hundred years with those of Englishmen and Scotchmen, and came to the
conclusion that the race, as a whole, took rank between Scotchmen and
Englishmen in intellectual capacity, while if the comparison had been
confined to western Jews, who alone have had an opportunity of
displaying their talents, they would have come out superior to both.
From the anthropological side we should expect that the
brachycephalism of Jews would show itself in superior mental capacity,
and this is confirmed by the number of distinguished persons of Jewish
blood recorded in the European dictionaries of biography.
The anthropological and sociological importance of this result, if
confirmed by further inquiry, seems to me of very great significance
for the science of anthropology, and for this reason I have insisted
so much upon it. Skull capacity and cephalic index are not so much
indications of race as of intellect. If it is found that, as a rule,
each race, and even each people, tends to have a uniform cephalic
index, that would merely imply that the sociological conditions of the
said race or people were tolerably uniform as regards intellectual
development. Australians, who have had no opportunity of pitting their
wits against any other competing race, and have depended for their
existence on the fleetness of their legs and the capacity of their
stomachs to carry food from one orgy to another, have used their
brains less than all other human races, and have the narrowest skulls
of all. Teutons, who have had the largest sphere for intellectual
rivalry with their neighbors, have the broadest skulls of all except
the Jews, who have, so to speak, lived by their wits the last two
thousand years. The evidence produced by Professor Ripley of
long-headed Jews among the lower developed communities only shows that
where the brain is not much exercised the skull is not broadened.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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