The Black Man's Place in South AfricaNielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
History
The Black Man's Place in South Africa
Nielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
Black people -- South Africa
It seems fair, therefore, to assume that the brain-weights of big men of
the Zulu, the Xosa and the Fingo tribes will be considerably above those
of European women, but to conclude from this that the capacity of the
big black man is higher than that of the average white woman would
hardly be possible to-day. I would say here that I do not accept the
suggestion, recently advanced, that the mental faculty of woman is
qualitatively different from that of man. I hold that there is no
difference of any kind between the intellectual powers of the male and
female human being. The comparative lack of mental achievement on the
part of women in the past I believe to have been due to a natural, and,
as I think, wholesome feminine disinclination to take up intellectual
studies and scientific pursuits that until recently have been deemed the
prerogative of men, and not to any innate inferiority of the female
brain.
According to Professor Sollas, whose high authority cannot be disputed,
the size of the brain when looked at broadly seems to be connected with
the taxinomic rank of the race, but when we come to details the
connection between cranial capacity and mental endowment becomes less
obvious. The Eskimo, for instance, who is of short stature, has a
cranial capacity of 1,550 cubic centimetres, thus surpassing some of the
most civilised peoples of Europe, and yet no one of this race has so far
startled the world with any kind of mental achievement. "The result,"
says Professor Sollas, "of numerous investigations carried out during
the last quarter of a century is to show that, within certain limits, no
discoverable relation exists between the magnitude of the brain--or even
its gross anatomy--and intellectual power," and he illustrates this
statement by a list giving the cranial capacities and brain-weights of a
number of famous men which shows that though Bismarck had a skull
capacity of 1,965 cubic centimetres, Liebniz, who attained to the
highest flights of genius, had a cranium measuring only 1,422 cubic
centimetres.
Dealing more particularly with the assumed relation between highly
specialised mental faculties and the anatomy of the brain, as apart from
its mere size, the same author cites the case of Dr. Georg Sauerwein,
who was master of forty or fifty languages, and whose brain after his
death at the age of 74 in December, 1904, was dissected by Dr. L. Stieda
with the idea that, since it is known that the motor centre for speech
is situated in what is called Broca's area, some connection between
great linguistic powers and the size or complication of the frontal lobe
might be found in this highly specialised brain, but the examination
revealed nothing that could be correlated with Sauerwein's exceptional
gift.[9]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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