Dr. Austin Flint, of New York, in his Physiology, gives the average weight of the brains of men as 50.2 ounces. Dr. Peacock, of Great Britain, makes it 50 ounces 3 drachms between twenty-five and fifty years of age. Dr. Thurman gives 49 ounces as the average throughout Europe, while Dr. F. Tiedemann, a famous naturalist of Germany, reckons it at 53.2 ounces.[43] Dr. Krause, a learned German, places it still higher, at 55.4 ounces.[44] Now, if we strike a balance between the highest and the lowest of these estimates, the mean will be 52.2. Then, recalling the average of our sixty famous men, which we found to be 51.3 ounces, it is shown to be nine tenths of an ounce below the average of ordinary men. Our tables of national average brain weights do not quite agree, because some of the subjects had been wasted by disease for many months before death, whereby the brain was diminished along with other parts of the body. Those who, like Dr. Boyd's subjects, died in hospital, showed too light an average for healthy Englishmen. Dr. Krause's subjects may have been healthy men killed in battle, and those of Tiedemann persons who died suddenly. Executed criminals show a fairly high average of brain weight, because there has been in their case no diminution through long-continued illness.[45] We should recollect that Whewell, the famous English philosopher and head master of Trinity College, Cambridge, England, was in good health when killed by a fall from his horse; so was Gambetta, when his life was ended by a pistol shot. The brain, however, suffers less from the power of disease than the general bodily form. One month under the most wasting sickness would probably not diminish the brain more than an ounce or two, but a year or more would make a considerable difference. Taking, now, the sixty heaviest brains of persons not noted for intellectual greatness, we find the averages to be 63.2 ounces. Comparing this with the average of sixty famous men, 51.3 ounces, we find a difference in favor of imbeciles, idiots, criminals, and men of ordinary mind of 11.9 ounces. George Combe estimated that about 53.5 ounces was the average weight of the adult brain. Thus the average brain weight of all the eminent men whom we have brought into the comparison, 51.3 ounces, is below Combe's estimate of that of mankind in general. Again, the ten heaviest brains of our list of famous men give an average weight of 61.1 ounces, while the average given by the ten heaviest of the opposite class is 70.4 ounces, or 9.3 ounces greater. While our list of eminent men shows only five whose brains exceeded 58.6 ounces in weight, those of seventy-six of the common throng--seven of them idiots or imbeciles--rise above that figure. These figures augur badly for the doctrine that would attach importance to heavy brains for giving force and depth of individual character.