Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1898: Volume LIV, No. 2, December 1898Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1898: Volume LIV, No. 2, December 1898
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
After long and careful research in the great libraries and museums
of the world, I have collected a table of brain weights of eminent
men, along with which are entered, in my original document, the
occupation of the subject, age at the time of determination, and the
source whence the item is derived. These can not be given within the
limits of this article, and only the briefest and most generalized
summary of the main features can be indicated. The largest weight of
brain in the whole list is that of the Russian novelist Turgenieff,
whose brain weighed, at the time of his death, at sixty-five years
of age, 71 ounces.[32] It is a considerable step from him to the
next in order, the English mechanician and author, Knight, whose
brain weight at the age of fifty-eight was 64 ounces. Then follow the
Scottish physician Abercrombie, 63 ounces; General B. F. Butler, 62
ounces; and the Scottish general Abercromby, 62 ounces. Another group
of nine, including weights from 58.6 ounces to 54 ounces, includes
Jeffrey, Scottish judge and author, Thackeray, Cuvier, George Combe,
United States Senator Atherton, Spurzheim, and the Scottish physician
Simpson. The next group, 53.6 to 50, is larger, including twenty-one
names, among which are Daniel Webster, Agassiz, Napoleon I, the
Scottish divine Chalmers, the mathematicians De Morgan and Gauss, the
anthropologist Broca, and the generals Skoboleff and Lamarque. The
last group, 49.9 to 40 ounces, contains twenty-five names, including
those of the philosopher Huber, Grote, Babbage, the anthropologist
Bertillon, Whewell,[33] Liebig, Gall, Gambetta, and Bishop, the mind
reader. Only one remove from the foot of the list is Gambetta, a man
of indisputably high genius and ability, with a brain weighing only
40.9 ounces.[34]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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