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
The theories which have assumed that the cultivation of the intellect
gives shape and size to the brain within and consequently to the
skull without, advocates of which have not been wanting, have been
disproved by the collected facts. "There is no proof," says Dr. J. C.
Nott, in his Types of Mankind, "of the theory that the cultivation of
the mind or of one set of faculties can give expansion or increased
size of brain. The Teutonic races, in their barbarous state, two
thousand years ago, possessed brains as large as now, and so with
other races."
The St. Louis Globe Democrat of November 13, 1885, gives an account
of some excavations on the Mount Ararat farm, east of Carrollton,
Illinois, where the bones of thirty-two Indians or mound builders
were unearthed. "They were not a diminutive race, as some people have
supposed, some of the thigh bones being sixteen inches long, and some
of the skulls twenty-four inches in circumference." A skull having
a circumference of twenty-four inches means a head that measured
from twenty-five to twenty-six and a half in life, when the cranium
was covered with skin and muscles. The average head of white men
in New York to-day is only twenty-two and a half inches round. So
the culture of the white race for centuries has not developed their
heads to near the size of those of the uncultured mound builders
who inhabited America many centuries ago. Our own opinion is that
cultivation by means of a thorough classical education, where the
appetite is restrained, as usually occurs, tends rather to diminish
the size of the head, by reducing the temporal muscles and the
adipose tissue under the scalp.
The Engis skull is one of the most ancient known to exist, and
belonged to the stone age, or about the same time as the Neanderthal
skull. Professor Huxley describes it as being well formed, and
considerably larger than the average of European skulls to-day in the
width and height of the forehead and in the cubic capacity of the
whole.
Quatrefages, in The Human Species, p. 312, says: "This skull (the
Engis or Cro-Magnon), so remarkable for its fine proportion, is also
remarkable for its capacity. According to M. Broca, who could only
work under precautions calculated to diminish the amount, it is equal
to at least 1,590 cubic centimetres (96.99 cubic inches). I have
already remarked that this number is far higher than the mean taken
from modern Parisians; it is equally so in comparison with other
European nations."
These facts all conspire to prove that the cultivation of thousands
of years has not increased the size of human skulls. In 1886, we
measured many of the skulls unearthed at Pompeii, the remains of
Romans who lived nearly two thousand years ago, and we found them on
the average larger in every way, but especially in the forehead, than
the skulls of Romans of this century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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