520 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



of science aims a deadly blow at modern culture. De Lapouge 1 

 contends that in France the restless and more enterprising long- 

 heads migrate from the rural districts in disproportionate numbers 

 to the towns, where they die out. For the department of Aveyron 

 he gives a table showing a steady rise of the cephalic index from 

 71*4 in prehistoric times to 86 -5 in 1889, and attributes this to 

 the dolichos gravitating chiefly to the large towns, as Dr Ammon 

 has also shown for Baden. Dr L. Laloy sums up the results thus : 

 France is being depopulated, and, what is worse, it is precisely 

 the best section of the inhabitants that disappears, the section 

 most productive in eminent men in all departments of learning, 

 while the ignorant and rude peats alone increase. 



These views have met with favour even across the Atlantic, 

 but are by no means universally accepted. The ground seems 

 cut from the whole theory by Prof. A. Macalister, who had a 

 paper at the Toronto Meeting of the British Association, 1897, 

 on "The Causes of Brachycephaly," showing that the infantile and 

 primitive skull is relatively long, and that there is a gradual change, 

 phylogenetic (racial) as well as ontogenetic (individual) toward 

 brachycephaly, which is certainly correlated with, and is apparently 

 produced by, cerebral activity and growth ; in the process of 

 development in the individual and the race the frontal lobes of 

 the brain grow the more rapidly and tend to fill out and broaden 

 the skull 2 . The tendency would thus have nothing to do with 

 rustic and urban life, nor would the round be necessarily, if at all, 

 inferior to the long head. Some of de Lapouge's generalisations 

 are also traversed by Livi 3 , Deniker 4 , Sergi 3 and others, so that a 



1 Recherches Anthrop. sur le Probleme de la Depopulation, in Rev. (? Econo- 

 mic politique, IX. p. 1002; x. p. 132 (1895-6). ' Nature, 1897, p. 487. 



3 Livi's results for Italy (Antropometria Alilitare) differ in some respects 

 from those of de Lapouge and Ammon for France and Baden. Thus he finds 

 that in the brachy districts the urban population is less brachy than the rural, 

 while in the dolicho districts the towns are more brachy than the plains. 



4 Dealing with some recent studies of the Lithuanian race, Deniker writes : 

 "Ainsi, done, contrairement aux idees de MM. de Lapouge et Ammon, en 

 Pologne, comme d'ailleurs en Italie, les classes les plus instruites, dirigeantes, 

 urbaines, sont plus brachy que les paysans" (L'Anthropologie, 1896, p. 351). 

 Similar contradictions occur in connection with light and dark hair, eyes etc. 



5 "E qui non posso tralasciare di avvertire un errore assai diffuso fra gli 



