254 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ence." A skull bavins; a circumference of twentv-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 cen- 

 turies 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 tem- 

 poral muscles and the adipose tissue under the scalp. 



The Encis 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 con- 

 siderably 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 



