Chapter VI: Part 6

In the excavations of the ancient cemetery of Antinoe, near Lyons,
France, a "party dress" of the time of the Emperor Adrian, very
fine silks, jewels, etc., have been discovered. One sarcophagus
held the remains of a woman musician with a rose chemise, a
cythara, pearls, castanets, etc.; in another was a child's costume
with its little laced shoes, its vest ornamented with flowers
_appliqués_, and its robe of gauffered crape. It appears that the
women of sixteen hundred years ago dyed their hair with henna, and
twisted ribbons round their heads. Nothing changes.

M. A. Thieullen, publishing the results of fifteen years'
studies among the flint implements of the French beds, draws the
conclusions that the elaborate palæolithic flint axe and hammer
and the typical neolithic implements were luxuries used by the
more distinguished members or for the more important purposes of
the flint-implement-using community, while the ruder implements
which are found in enormous numbers were the objects of general
and daily use throughout all the flint-using ages, whether
palæolithic or neolithic.

BRAIN WEIGHTS AND INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY.

BY JOSEPH SIMMS, M. D.

Having been for thirty years a lecturer on man and his character as evinced by his form, features, head, and gestures, and having made observations on the subject in all parts of North America, in continental Europe and Great Britain, and parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia, I should not be deemed presumptuous when I present a few facts regarding the relations of mind and the size and forms of heads and weights of brains. It has been observed by many persons versed in the branches relating to the subject that men with the largest brains are not those of most talent, power, or intellect; but many such have been only ordinary or inferior men, or even idiots; while some men of most powerful and comprehensive minds have had unusually small brains. Esquirol's assertion that no size or form of head or brain is incident to idiocy or to superior talent is borne out by my observations.

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]

The table goes to illustrate a general rule which I discovered and published several years ago, that larger brains appertain to natives of colder climates. Dr. John Abercrombie, for instance, was born at Aberdeen, Scotland, on the German Sea, and farther north than any part of the United States. Sir Ralph Abercromby was born in the county of Clackmannan, Scotland, where it is far colder than any part of southern Europe. Lord Francis Jeffrey first saw light in Edinburgh. General Butler was born in Deerfield, New Hampshire. Ivan Turgenieff, with the heaviest brain of all, was a native of cold, inhospitable Russia. Dr. Franz Joseph Gall (brain weight 42.2 ounces)[35] was born in Würtemberg, in southern Germany, passed most of his life in Vienna and Paris, and, being a student, spent much of his time indoors. Gambetta was born at Cahors, France, of Italian parents. This climatological view of the size of brains is confirmed by a paper, "Crania," of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, which gives as the average size, in cubic inches, of the cranial cavities of various nationalities, taking the results of many measurements: Lapps, 102; Swedes, 100; Anglo-Saxons, 96; Finns, 95; Anglo-Americans, 94; Germans, 92; Celts, 88; Malays, 86; Chinese, 85; Tombs of Gizeh, 84; embalmed Semitic, 82; Egyptians, 80; Fellah, 79; Bengalese, 78.

A table of average brain weights of various nationalities, compiled from Topinard's and Manouvrier's works and other standard anthropological publications, illustrates the same tendency toward greater brain weights in colder countries. One of its results is to show that the colder air of the United States produces larger brains in the negroes than the warm air of Africa. The table further shows, in the comparisons of Hindus and African negroes, that the brains are smallest in the warmest countries, irrespective of race or nation; and that the largest average attained is in Scotland, where it is never extremely warm.

The measurement of the cranial cavity is a very uncertain gauge of the size of the brain, for the cerebro-spinal fluid may occupy a large share of the space. Weighing the brain is without doubt the only scientifically certain method of determining its size and mass.

Perhaps the most remarkable case in the table of great men's brains is that of Gambetta, who was behind none of his compeers in ability, and yet had the smallest brain of all. The first table of the "Average Weight of the Human Body and Mind," compiled from Dr. Boyd's researches among the sane, which was based on more than two thousand post-mortem examinations, gives 45.9 ounces as the average brain weight of boys from seven to fourteen years of age, and 40.2 ounces as that of boys and 40.1 ounces of girls from four to seven years of age. And this little brain of 40.9 ounces appertained to a man, "a lofty, commanding, mental figure, standing out in bold relief from the crowd of mediocrities which he dwarfs and shadows," the embodiment of the French Republic, who steered it through one of its most perilous crises, "the foremost Frenchman of his time," who "established his claim to be placed in the very front rank of European statesmen," and whose untimely death was spoken of as "nothing less than the sudden extinction of a powerful individual force, one of the most powerful, indeed, of such forces hitherto operating in Europe."

In illustration of the association of large brains with small minds, we have compiled from various sources of recognized authority a list of one hundred and twenty-five persons of ordinary or weak minds, idiots, imbeciles, and criminals, whose brains were generally larger than those of the distinguished men subjects of the preceding notes. Of these, Rustan, an ignorant and unknown workman, appears with a brain weighing 78.3 ounces;[36] the dwarfed Indian squaw who follows him, of 73.5 ounces;[37] an illiterate and weak-minded man had a brain of 71.3 ounces;[38] and a congenitally imbecile person cited by Dr. Ireland, with one of 70.5 ounces.[39] Another imbecile cited by Dr. Ireland had a brain of 63.2 ounces, and the brain of an idiot with a large head, eighteen years old, who had an idiotic sister, weighed 62.8 ounces. The brain of the idiot, No. 56 of the men in the table, 59.5 ounces, is exceeded in size by those of only five on the list of famous men, while eleven persons recorded as idiots, imbeciles, and children had brains heavier than his. An idiot boy of fourteen years, very malicious, who never spoke, and who nearly killed his sister with a pick, had a brain weight of 57.5 ounces. Thirty men out of three hundred and seventy-five examined in the West Riding Asylum gave brain weights of 55 ounces and upward, showing that such weights are not so rare as some have supposed. In another asylum in England one out of every dozen brains examined showed a weight of 55 ounces or more.

In _Nachrichten_, of Göttingen, 1860, pp. 70-71, Dr. Rudolph Wagner gave a table of thirty-two persons whose brains he examined, among whom were five distinguished men; but the largest brain weight recorded in it, 55.9 ounces, has opposite to it the legend, "Idiotic grown man."

To this list we might have added a large number of persons whose brains weighed less than 53 ounces. Yet the brains of Daniel Webster, Agassiz, Napoleon I, Lord Byron, Baron Dupuytren, General Skoboleff, and other famous men concerning whose large brains much has been said, weighed less than this; and we might have appended hundreds of brain weights of idiots, imbeciles, and other insignificant persons, from 53 ounces down to 49 ounces--probably about the average weight in central Europe. In support of our contention is, further, an observation by Dr. Rudolph Wagner in _Nachrichten_, February 29, 1860, pp. 71, 72, that "very intelligent men certainly do not differ strikingly in brain weight from less gifted men."

Dr. Clendenning presents in the Croonian Lectures the following entries of brain weights of male subjects of different ages, the tendency of which is to show that the male encephalon loses, after it is grown, more than an ounce every ten years:

15 to 30 years 50.75 ounces.
30 to 50 " 49.66 "
50 to 70 " 47.1 "
70 to 100 " 41.5 "

A number of other eminent anatomists have given similar evidence of decrease in brain weight as intellectual power increases.

The "Professor at the Breakfast Table," the late Dr. O. W. Holmes, a learned man and experienced physician and professor of anatomy in Harvard University for thirty-five years, says: "The walls of the head are double, with a great chamber of air between them, over the smallest and most crowded organs. Can you tell me how much money there is in a safe, which also has thick walls, by kneading the knobs with your fingers? So, when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of individuality, size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt over the outside of my strong box, and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-dollar bill under this or that rivet. Perhaps there is, only he doesn't know anything about it. We will add that, even if he knows the inward dimensions of the strong box, he could not thence determine the amount of cash deposited in it."

The internal size of Spurzheim's skull was in cubic inches exactly the same as that of the skull of Joachim, an imbecile six feet nine inches in height, with a brain weight of 61.2 ounces, whereas Spurzheim's brain weighed only 55 ounces.

Whoever has examined heads in the dissecting room of a medical college knows that, except in rare cases of disease, the brain does not fit the skull, but is surrounded by three membranes and a watery fluid; and this liquid, it has been ascertained, is generally sufficient to admit of its performing certain movements.

There can be no doubt that the brain moves in the skull, changing its position, according to the laws of gravitation, in much the same way as the lungs, heart, and liver do in the body. It has been observed many times to move, as well as to pulsate, when exposed to view during the life of the individual. It is subject to two regular and constant motions--one produced by the arteries, the other by respiration. It has also a third motion, discovered and described by Dr. M. Luys, who stated, in a paper read before the Academy of Medicine of Paris, that "the brain is subject to certain changes of position, dependent on the attitude of the body. Thus, if a man lies on his back or side, or stands on his head, the brain undergoes certain changes of position in obedience to the laws of gravity; the movements take place slowly, and the brain is five or six minutes in returning to its previous position." From these anatomical data M. Luys deduced some interesting and practical conclusions, by which he explained, for example, the symptoms of vertigo which feeble persons experience when suddenly rising from a horizontal position. He suggested whether the pains of meningitis may not be due to an interference with these normal movements, and urges the value of giving the brain the change produced by a horizontal position at night.

The average cranial capacity is admitted to be 96 cubic inches in England and 94 in New York; and it is to the unusual quantity of fluid of some cases, and to the extraordinary thickness of the skull in others, that we are to attribute the frequent discrepancy between the external dimensions and the size of the encephalon. Daniel Webster's cranial capacity was 122 cubic inches, yet his brain of 53.5 ounces was just what George Combe has laid down as the average weight for an adult man. Water and lymph, we are told, filled the skull. Professor De Morgan's head, almost free from hair, measured 24.87 inches in circumference, and the dimensions were all those of a very large head, sufficient to contain from 65 to 70 ounces of brain, yet his brain weighed only 52.75 ounces, or little, if at all, above the average in the cold parts of the temperate zones. De Morgan was sixty-five years of age when he died. He was much emaciated, and "the brain was distinctly shrunken," not filling the interior cavity, where its place was supplied, as is usual in such cases, by serum or water. There is no known method whereby any man can determine whether brain or water fills the greater part of any living skull. A small orange may have a thin rind, and contain a good amount of eatable substance, while a large one may have so thick a skin that the fruit proves utterly disappointing.

Another proof that the skull is formed without regard to the brain is the following: "The bony cabinet and its contents are developed, to a certain extent at least, independently. This is very clearly demonstrated by a fact which was observed by Gratiolet, and is too frequently forgotten. The subject is an infant in whom the cranium presented the normal conformation. The brain was, nevertheless, almost entirely wanting."[40]

Dr. Gall was a poor arithmetician, and his biographer says that every kind of numerical calculation fatigued him. He could not go through a process of multiplication or division that was at all complicated, and knew nothing of geometry or of the problems of mathematics.[41] George Combe said of himself: "Arithmetic has always been to me a profound mystery, and to master the multiplication table an insurmountable task.... This faculty in me is, in fact, idiotic." Again he said: "When a boy, I never could learn arithmetic. At the end of five years' teaching I could not subtract, divide, or multiply any considerable number of figures with accuracy and facility, and can not now do so.... At the present day I can not sum a column of figures correctly."[42]

With these facts in view, our wonder at finding the theories of these men at variance with all exact calculation is considerably diminished. We propose to test some of their theories by arithmetical processes. We found that the sixty famous men entered in the table of authenticated brain weights show an average of 51.3 ounces. We now take all the idiots and imbeciles in the table of "Large Brains and Small Minds," and find the average 59.4 ounces; so that the matter is left to stand thus: Ten idiots and five imbeciles average 59.2 ounces; sixty famous men average 51.39 ounces: in favor of idiocy and imbecility, 7.9 ounces.

The heaviest brain in the table of small minds is that of Rustan, an ignorant and entirely unknown laborer. He was a healthy man, and his brain, when it was weighed, was in a healthy condition. Its weight was recorded by Dr. Carl A. Rudolphi, a Swedish naturalist and physiologist of Stockholm, who became professor of anatomy and physiology at Berlin in 1810. It reached the unexampled figure of 78.3 ounces; while the brain of Turgenieff, the heaviest among famous men, was 71 ounces--showing a difference of 7.3 ounces in behalf of the inferior mind.

Since writing the above, the following appeared in Tit-Bits, a weekly paper published in London, England, March 19, 1898:

"It must not be assumed, however, that intellect is in direct ratio to the weight of the brain; for while the brains of certain intellectual men, such as ... Dr. Abercromby, weighed more than 60 ounces, a certain Strand newspaper-boy, who was in intelligence almost an idiot, had a brain which weighed no less than 80 ounces."

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.

Phrenologists assert that each organ of a mental faculty occupies a certain position perceptible on the outside of the brain, with a definite area which they have mapped out. They also hold that each of these organs extends to the center of the base of the brain, tapering to it somewhat like a cone, having its base turned toward the outer world. They make no account of the fissures, the intervening sulci and anfractuosities that must cut many of these supposed cones, some at right and some at oblique angles. Then the large, long cavities or ventricles intercept and would hinder many of them from reaching the central, basilar part of the brain. The anatomical structure of the brain thus appears fatal to this theory of the organs.

Large and complicated convolutions of the brain with deep sulci have been regarded by some persons as inseparable from superior powers of mind. The supposition is erroneous and groundless. The rodents, such as beavers, squirrels, rats, mice, etc., have but little brain and no convolutions whatsoever;[46] yet the beaver exhibits great foresight, economy, industry, and mechanical skill in building his dam, erecting his house, and storing up bark as food for the winter. Moreover, these animals live in societies and labor in union by ingenious methods for a common purpose, with nice judgment. "So great a variety of labors," says Dr. Leuret, "is needed for the constructions carried on by the beaver; they include so many instances of well-made choice, so many accidental difficulties are surmounted by these animals, that it is impossible not to recognize in their actions the characteristics of a rather high intelligence."[47] The sheep has a much larger brain than the beaver, with numerous and complete convolutions, yet it is one of the most stupid of domestic animals. Again, though birds have convolutions in the cerebellum, they have none in the cerebrum, and yet they are more capable of education than any living beings except the human race. The eagle is complete master of the lamb; the magpie, the hawk, the raven, and the parrot with his talking powers, are not excelled in sagacity by the dog, the horse, or the elephant, notwithstanding the latter animals have brains of superior size and elaborate convolutions.

Squirrels manifest foresight and economy in storing nuts for the winter's use; yet they have no brain convolutions. The cetacea, especially whales, have much larger brains than men, with more numerous and more complex convolutions and deeper sulci; yet their intelligence bears no comparison with that of the human race.

Three eminent men are known to have had very small convolutions of the brain--viz., Louis Asseline, Dr. Tiedemann, and Baron von Liebig. We have to add to this remarkable list two, not named, but described by Dr. Wagner as having been very intelligent, who yet possessed very few convolutions in their very small brains.[48] As Wagner's book was printed before Liebig died, he could not have been one of the two to whom the author referred.

Idiots often possess as large brains as men distinguished for intellectual power, and their brains have as deep sulci, and convolutions as fine, as large, and as complex. Our table of the common and weak-minded contains a mention of an idiot whose brain weighed 53 ounces, or exactly as much as Napoleon's, and had fine convolutions and a large frontal lobe, but who could never learn to speak.

The elephant carries a far larger brain than man, finely formed, broad and high in front, with much more numerous and complex convolutions and deeper anfractuosities, and yet no intelligent person would for a moment claim that its mind excels or even equals that of man.

It may be well here to allow some eminent physiologists to give their views on this subject. "The researches of anatomists have disposed of every point advanced by Gall. Curiously enough, M. Camille Dareste has placed beyond dispute the fact that the number and depth of the convolutions bear no direct proportion to the development of intelligence, whereas they do bear a direct proportion to the size of the animal.... It is notorious that the instinct of propagation, the instinct of destructiveness, the instinct of constructiveness, and other qualities are manifested by animals having no brains, nothing but simple ganglia."[49]

Dr. Bastian demonstrates the convolutional theory thus: "In animals of the same group or order, the number and complexity of the convolutions increase with the size of the animal.... There can not, therefore, be among animals of the same order any simple or definite relation between the degree of intelligence of the creature and the number or disposition of its cerebral convolutions."[50]

We have the following testimony in our favor from Dr. Rudolph Wagner, of Göttingen: "Examples of highly complicated convolutions I have never seen, even among eminent men whose brains I have examined.... Many convolutions and great brain weight often go together. Higher intelligence appears in both kinds of brains, where there are many or where there are few convolutions. It is not proved that special mental gifts go with many convolutions."[51]

Another theory of mind is based on the gray matter of the brain, the amount of which has been supposed to be proportionate to mental capacity. As this gray matter, however, averages only about one fifth of an inch in thickness, it seems rather a thin foundation for the human intellect if the condition is good that "size is a measure of power."

The late Dr. W. B. Carpenter stated the matter thus: "The cortical substance or gray matter of the hemispheres essentially consists of that vesicular nerve substance which, in the spinal cord as in the ganglionic masses generally, is found to occupy the interior. The usual thickness is about one fifth of an inch; but considerable variations present themselves in this respect, as also in the depth of the convolutions."[52]

Daniel Webster's brain had gray substance to the depth only of one sixteenth of an inch.[53] It thus appears that his brain had a thinner layer of gray matter than the average of common-minded men--one among the many proofs that facts are against all theories that connect brain conditions with intellectual power.

Dr. Ireland thus describes an idiot boy who, though thirteen or fourteen years of age, was only three feet eight inches in height: "In expression he was dull and inanimate, with an old face and a short, squat figure.... The convolutions were broad and simple, but not shallow. The gray matter was as broad as usual."[54]

The writer has examined many brains of persons morally or intellectually below the average--such as murderers, negroes, and others sunk in ignorance. He has invariably found the layer of vesicular or gray matter to be thicker than that of Daniel Webster's brain. Elephants, porpoises, whales, dolphins, and the grampus all have this layer thicker than the most intellectual men. Another great objection to locating mind in the gray matter of the brain is that this substance is found in the interior part of the spinal cord, and in all the nerve centers throughout the body; so that, if mind is situated in it, it is not confined to the brain, but dwells in the spine also, and is distributed all through the human frame. Still another objection lies in the fact that wherever the gray matter exists near the surface of the brain, it consists of three distinct layers, separated by a white substance, and the outermost layer is white, not gray.[55]

The _septum lucidum_ consists of gray matter. The _corpus striatum_, situated at the base of the lateral ventricles, nearly in the center of the brain, was from three eighths to half an inch in diameter in an ox which was dissected in Edinburgh. This is about the same amount as is found in the _corpus striatum_ of the human brain. There would be lively times if it were possible for a mental faculty to occupy at once all the localities where gray matter is found!

None of the suppositions about certain qualities of mind inhering in particular portions of the brain have been proved, nor have they stood the tests of science.

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.

In the museums of Switzerland we measured in 1887 several skulls of the ancient lake dwellers of that country, and found them larger in all respects, but particularly in the forehead, than those of the Swiss people of the last fifty years. The average circumference of the skulls we measured in the catacombs of Paris was twenty-one inches and a half, which is about an inch more than that of Parisians who have died within the past fifty years.

"The average internal capacity of the Peruvian skull is only seventy-three cubic inches; that of Toltec skulls, seventy-seven inches, and that of barbarous tribes, eighty-two inches; so that the extraordinary anomaly is presented of a larger brain being possessed by the barbarous tribes than by the nations who achieved no mean degree of civilization in Central America and Peru. The average European skull is ninety-three inches in bulk."[56] The author was informed by Mr. Lucien Carr, of the Ethnological Museum of Harvard University, that the capacity of the Peruvian skulls was about one hundred centimetres smaller than that of the skulls of any other people living in America at the same time. Yet that small-headed people was the most highly civilized of all.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] Medical Times and Gazette, London, England, November 17, 1883.

[33] Whewell also had "the scalp and skull thick." Brain weighed 49 ounces. The Lancet, London, England, March 17, 1866, p. 280.

[34] Medical Times and Gazette, London, England, May 12, 1883, p. 525.

[35] London Medical Gazette, London, England, September 13, 1828, p. 478.

[36] Brain Weight of Man. By Dr. Bischoff. Bonn, Germany, 1880, p. 137.

[37] Authority for this weight is the Medical Army Museum, Washington, D. C.

[38] This brain is kept in and its weight is recorded on the glass jar in the Pathological Museum at Munich, Germany.

[39] Idiocy and Imbecility. By Dr. Ireland. London, 1877, p. 75.

[40] The Human Species. By A. De Quatrefages. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1884, p. 380.

[41] Dr. Gall's works, Boston, Massachusetts, vol. i, p. 36.

[42] Life of George Combe, London, 1878, vol. ii, p. 381.

[43] Medical News and Gazette, London, June 16, 1888, p. 521.

[44] Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia, February 23, 1884.

[45] Eleven Chinamen, found by Dr. C. Clapham to afford an average of 50.4 ounces, had been killed in a typhoon, and were therefore in no wise wasted by disease. (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, London, England, vol. vii, p. 90.)

[46] The Nervous System, London, 1834, p. 447.

[47] Anatomie comparative du système nerveux, tome i, 1839, p. 506.

[48] Ueber die typischen Verschiedenheiten der Windungen der Hemisphären und über die Lehre vom Hirngewicht, Göttingen, 1860. Also see Pathology and Therapeutics of Mental Diseases, London, 1870, p. 23.

[49] History of Philosophy, London, 1867, vol. ii, p. 433.

[50] The Brain as an Organ of Mind, London, 1880, pp. 276, 277.

[51] Nachrichten, Göttingen, February 29, 1860, p. 75.

[52] Carpenter's Principles of Human Physiology, London, 1881, p. 659.

[53] Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 1853, vol. lxxix, p. 360.

[54] Idiocy and Imbecility, London, 1877, pp. 216-219.

[55] See The Brain as an Organ of Mind, London, 1880, p. 465; also, The Human Brain, London, 1847, pp. 288, 289.

[56] Eclectic Magazine, December 14, 1863, p. 428.

SPELEOLOGY, OR CAVE EXPLORATION.[57]

BY M. E. A. MARTEL.

The not very graceful word _speleology_ was composed a few years ago by M. Émile Rivière out of Greek elements, as a translation of the German _Höhlenkunde_, to signify the study of caves. The study claims a place among the sciences, and is, I believe, able to justify its claim. Caves have been subjects of interest and curiosity in all times and countries. In the primitive ages, when palæolithic man was obliged to defend himself against the large Quaternary wild beasts, and did not yet know how to construct cabins, he lived in the most inaccessible caves, or those easiest to close, which he could find. Afterward, when man had advanced in civilization to the neolithic stage, and had somewhat improved tools and arms, having learned to build huts and villages, caves became simply burial places. In the historical periods of antiquity they were transformed into pagan sanctuaries or temporary hiding places in times of revolt, civil war, or invasion. Down to the middle ages and the renascence, they shared this function with abandoned quarries. Through these changes they gradually became objects of popular fear and absurd legend. I have nearly everywhere in France found legendary and profound belief in some monstrous basilisk or dragon in the depths of dark caverns, guarding immense treasures; and woe to the rash adventurer who tried to steal these riches!

In short, caves have suffered their vicissitudes; their use as habitations seems to be inversely proportioned to the degree of civilization. The miserable aborigines of Australia have not yet quite abandoned them; and in France the present occupation of the grottoes of Ezy, in the Eure, by some outcast families, who lead a sordid existence in them, indifferent to all social conventions, has recently been cited as an extremely curious anthropological phenomenon.

Science, too, has laid its hold on caves only within a little more than a century; for it was not till 1774 that Esper recognized that the large bones taken from the caverns near Baireuth, in Bavaria, were not those of human giants, but of extinct animals, and he called them, they being petrified by limestone, _zoöliths_, or animal-stones; and it was his remarks upon them that drew Cuvier's attention to paleontology.

Three sciences have of late years been advanced by the explorations of caves: paleontology; prehistory, or research among the remains of primitive men and their industries; and zoölogy, or the study of living beings. The animals of caverns--crustaceans, insects, batrachians, and fishes--constitute a special fauna, which has been for fifty years a subject of study to naturalists of various nations, and to the anatomy of which M. Armand Viré, of the Natural History Museum of Paris, has been giving special attention for five years past.

There are other sciences the study of which in connection with caves, while capable of yielding valuable fruits, has been too long neglected: geology, for their origin and formation; mineralogy, for their relations to metallic veins; meteorology, for thermometrical and barometrical variations and the formation of carbonic acid; terrestrial physics, for the experiments on gravity that might be carried on in deep vertical pits, supplementing the observations of Foucault in the Pantheon at Paris, and Airy in the English mines; hydrology, which has hardly yet perceived that caves are predominantly great laboratories of springs; agriculture, which might transform them into reservoirs for times of drought or storage basins in case of flood; and public hygiene, which is just beginning to discover that they may harbor in their fissures hitherto unsuspected causes of contamination of the water of the springs that issue from them. The number and importance of these new problems that have arisen from the recent extension of underground investigations seem fully to justify the specialization of the science of caves--another creation of the Speleological Society, now four years old. This special interest in the science of caves began about fifteen years ago, when, in 1883, three members of the Austro-German Alpine Club--Herren Harske, Marinitsch, and Müller--resumed in the limestone plateaus of Istria and Carniola called the Karst, explorations which had been actively and profitably carried on in the middle of the century, from 1850 to 1857, by Dr. Adolf Schmidt, whose discoveries in the caves of Adelsberg, Planina, and St. Canzion won him a membership in the Vienna Academy of Sciences. Their efforts and those of Herr F. Kraus, who died last year, had the result of interesting the Austrian Government in the subject; and since 1886 various engineers have been commissioned by the Minister of Agriculture to make official explorations and construct economical works in the caves and underground rivers of Istria, Carniola, and Herzegovina. Credits are granted every year for enterprises which prove to be more useful than would at first be thought.

It was at the same time, between 1883 and 1885, that I made my first investigation in the Causses of Lozère, Aveyron, and the adjoining departments of France, the results of which were to reveal for the first time to the public, and even to geographers, the picturesque beauties, then unknown, and now becoming the fashion, of the gorges of the Tarn, Jenta, and Dourbie, the rocks of Montpelier le Vieux, etc. In my excursions over the plateaus of the Causses I frequently met, at the level of the surface, open, dark holes, and mouths of vertical wells--_avens_--the depths of which no one had ever looked into, unsoundable, they said, which the peasants naturally took to be real mouths of hell. Recollecting what I had admired at Adelsberg and in various caves of the Pyrenees, I guessed these avens might also be doorways to subterranean splendors and scientific treasures. So I began in 1888 the methodical exploration of the unexamined natural cavities of my own land first, and then of other countries of Europe; and since then I have devoted several weeks every year to this work.

These pits are simply horizontal holes opening upon the surface of the ground, of very different forms and dimensions. Herdsmen are very careful not to let their cattle go too near them, for they sometimes fall in.

The diameter of these pits varies from a few inches to several hundred yards, and they are sometimes more than six hundred feet deep. It is not easy to go down into them, especially when they are on high levels away from habitations and roads. In such cases a considerable apparatus of ropes, rope ladders, telephone, portable boat, tent, etc., has to be taken along. The first measurement with the sounding line gives the depth only of the first pit--and there are often several succeeding one another. A rope ladder long enough to reach the bottom is then let down, and the man who descends has a rope tied about him for additional security, which is held by the people above. A great many pits are narrower at the top than lower down, forming something like a reversed speaking trumpet, so that the explorer finds it very difficult to make himself heard at the top; hence I have adopted the practice of taking a telephone along. The interior shapes of the pits are very diverse. The narrower ones are easiest to go down, because they permit one partly to support himself against their walls. The wider ones leave him hanging loose, in a position which he feels to be very precarious. When there is a second or third pit, and we have not ladders enough, we have to trust ourselves to a simple rope with a board fastened at the end of it for a seat. The _gouffre_ of Vigne Close, in Ardèche, which is about six hundred feet deep, has five successive pits, and its complete exploration required three days. The bottom of the pit may be a simple cleft in the rock, or an immense cathedral-like chamber; as at Rabanel, near Ganges, and Hérault, the deepest abyss in France, the vault of which expands into a gigantic nave, five hundred feet high, which is lighted by the beam of light that falls through the opening, presenting a grand and indescribable spectacle. Some pits of less depth, as the Tin doul de la Vayssière, in Aveyron, and the Padirac well, in Lot, both leading to underground rivers, enjoy a still more complete illumination. Considerable talus banks close the ends of these broad pits, and are generally produced by the caving in of the roofs of caves.

Lively controversies and gross errors have prevailed concerning the geological formation of abysses. The abyss of Jean Nouveau, Vaucluse, among others, furnishes evidence against the false hypothesis that such pits are as a rule the results of cave-ins, whereas pits of that origin are rare and exceptional. These pits are for the most part fissures, the principal feature of which is their narrowness. At Jean Nouveau the greatest breadth is not more than about sixteen feet. It is the deepest vertical pit of a single shaft without intermediate terraces that we know of, and is about five hundred and thirty feet from the surface of the ground to its floor. The mass of stone rubbish at the bottom prevented our descending into a second pit.

Pits composed, like Vigne Close, of several successive wells, destroy another hypothesis--that of the formation of _gouffres_ by the emissions from thermal springs.

The greatest danger in descending these pits arises from the showers of stones that sometimes come down upon the head of the explorer. These are often started by his friends the hunters, or by their dogs gamboling around at will.

While some of the caverns I have explored were stopped up by obstacles of one kind or another that prevented further progress, in others we found considerable rivers running a nearly free course. We rarely found pits formed by the collapse of the roofs of the cave in cases where the distance from the subterranean river which by its work of erosion provoked the catastrophe to the surface was more than one hundred metres. The pit of the Mas Raynal, Aveyron, is one hundred and six metres deep, and abuts upon a large subterranean river, which supplies the Sorgues of Saint-Affrique, one of the finest springs of France. When we explored it, in 1889, we could not pass the low chambers which occur in it because the water was too high, and we have not visited it since. Its exploration in a dry season might reveal many very interesting chambers.

In the cave of Rabanel, the first well, which ends in a talus of fallen stones, furnishes an instance of a vertical fissure grafted, if we may use the word, upon an interior grotto that already existed. A stream runs through this grotto which falls into a second well twenty-six metres, and is then lost in smaller passages so nearly stopped up with earth that we were not able to follow it through its course of about a mile till it comes out at the Brissac spring.

The cave of Trebiciano, in Istria, near Trieste, the deepest known, has a total depth of more than a thousand feet. It is not, however, entirely natural, but is composed of numerous vertical fissures which lead, at about eight hundred and fifty feet below the surface, to a large cavern, at the bottom of which flows the subterranean river Recca. The fissures do not naturally communicate directly with one another, but the engineer Lindner was commissioned in 1840-'41 by the city of Trieste to construct for the municipality a supply of potable water from the underground streams, and after eleven months of labor made artificial connections between the different parts of the chasm.

These vertical pits are formed by the wearing down, from the top, by the waters which become ingulfed in them. This mode of their formation was demonstrated to me in 1895, when I was in Great Britain under a commission from the French Minister of Instruction. I then explored several caves in which the rivers were still running, and satisfied myself that the pits were simply absorbing wells. Such wells are not effective now in southern France and Austria, but in northern Europe, where rain is more abundant, they are still operative. I found the plainest evidence of this fact in Yorkshire, at the Gaping Ghyll, Ingleborough, where a river precipitates itself at one leap one hundred metres under the earth. English investigators and travelers had tried without success to descend into it in 1845, 1870, and 1894, having conquered only about one hundred and ninety-five feet of its total depth of two hundred and twenty-nine feet. It took me twenty-five minutes to go down upon a rope ladder which was suspended in the midst of the cascade. Fortunately, the pit had the daylight to the very bottom--a wonderful spectacle, compensating me for all my trouble and the long douche bath which greeted me at the end of the descent, where stretched an immense Roman nave nearly five hundred feet long, eighty feet wide, and ninety feet high, without any sustaining pillar. From the middle of the roof of this colossal cavern fell the cascade in a great nimbus of vapor and light--a wonderful fantastic scene, such as Gustave Doré or Jules Verne could never have imagined. The most pleasant feature of the whole of it, however, to me was the thought that I had succeeded where the English had failed, and on their own ground. The people were nevertheless very pleasant to me, and at my instance have continued the exploration and made some new discoveries.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique._

FOOTNOTE:

[57] From an address before the Société des Amis des Sciences.

SKETCH OF CHARLES HENRY HITCHCOCK.

The name of Prof. Charles H. Hitchcock is closely associated with the progress of New England geology, especially with the discovery of the great terminal glacial moraine, and, in connection with the name of his father, Dr. Edward Hitchcock, with the study of the fossil bird tracks of the Connecticut River Valley.

CHARLES HENRY HITCHCOCK was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, August 23, 1836, the son of Prof. Edward Hitchcock, the eminent geologist, who was afterward president of Amherst College. The family is of English origin, and was planted in America by two brothers who came over at nearly the same time and made homes for themselves in New Haven, removing later to towns near by. Luke Hitchcock, the ancestor of the subject of this sketch, came in 1695, and finally settled at Wethersfield, Connecticut. His descendants in the direct line lived at Springfield, Granville, Deerfield, and Amherst, Massachusetts. Professor Hitchcock is in the seventh generation from Luke, and is equally removed from Elder John White, his maternal ancestor, who came to Canton, Massachusetts, toward the end of the seventeenth century, and removed thence to the Connecticut Valley. Both lines of ancestry were purely English, and all the progenitors were men of integrity, regarded in their times as worthy to fill offices of trust in church and town. Two of them served in the Revolutionary army.

The father of Professor Hitchcock was one of the most distinguished geologists and educators of his time, and his services, especially as State Geologist of Massachusetts, have already been described in the Popular Science Monthly.[58] His mother was the daughter of Jacob White, a well-to-do farmer of Amherst, who, believing in the education of women, had given her the best opportunities for study available at the time. She could read the Greek Testament and calculate eclipses, and was a gifted artist with pencil and brush. She prepared with her own hands many of the numerous illustrations in her husband's reports, and also diagrams for the lecture room. She took indefatigable pains with the education of her children, placing their moral and religious welfare first. Of the eight children of the family, six of whom reached maturity, the surviving brother is professor of physical culture, and, for the time being, acting president at Amherst College, and one of the two surviving sisters, the widow of the Rev. C. M. Terry, has been for several years matron of the Hubbard Cottage, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Beginning with 1835, the year before Professor Hitchcock was born, his father, Professor Edward Hitchcock, was largely occupied with the study of the "fossil bird tracks" in the New Red Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, and with the discussions to which the investigation gave rise, the story of which has been told by Prof. C. H. Hitchcock himself in the Popular Science Monthly (vol. iii, August, 1873). Besides the search for the fossils and their collection and comparison, and the examination of the literature that might throw light on the subject, there were studies into the proper interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, the debate with Prof. Moses Stewart, of Andover, and the gradual approach of the American clergy to general acquiescence in the belief that geology is not at variance with Scripture. Professor Hitchcock's childhood was largely spent under the influence of these studies and discussions. The boy seemed to be full of promise, and because of his observing ways and proneness to speculation was called "the young philosopher." He used to bring his mother the very small flowers of _Spergula rubra_, which are so obscure that older eyes often fail to notice them. He seemed to be fonder of his father than the other children, and was never so happy as with him. Through this constant intercourse Charles became absorbed in his father's pursuits, and grew up into a knowledge of geology from Nature and from verbal explanations--a more satisfactory method than that of learning from books; and he was associated with his father in all his geological work from the time when he was first old enough to be of service. Thus, before 1856 he was acquainted, from inspection, with the terraces and reputed beaches and drift phenomena of all western Massachusetts; he had handled every specimen of a foot mark in the Appleton Cabinet, and by 1861 was the principal assistant on the Vermont Survey, having prepared for the press the greater part of the matter of the report. He had enjoyed the best educational advantages of his day, having completed the classical and preparatory courses of Williston Seminary, and been graduated thence in 1852, then graduated from Amherst College in 1856, a short time before his twentieth birthday. Among his early classmates and college friends were Dr. Cyrus Northrup, president of Minnesota University; Dr. Richard Mather, professor of Greek at Amherst College; the Rev. Dr. Goodwin, of Chicago; and Dr. William Hayes Ward, editor of The Independent. After graduation he spent a year in special study of Hebrew and chemistry at Yale College, two years at Andover Theological Seminary, and one year in Europe, studying in the Royal School of Mines under Professor Huxley, and in the British Museum investigating the crustacea and trilobites. Here he enjoyed the friendship of Professor Richard Owen, and had the guidance of Dr. H. Woodward.