698 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



MORE ABOUT MEN'S AND WOMEN'S 

 BRAINS. 

 Editor Popular Science Monthly : 



SIR : In replying to a letter by me, pub- 

 lished in the June number of this jour- 

 nal, Dr. William A. Hammond dispensed 

 with the ordinary courtesy of discussion, 

 and, at the same time, quite dexterously 

 evaded the question at issue. He drops the 

 " numerous, striking, and easily-detected sex 

 differences in brain" which were "to be 

 perceived at once " in comparing the two, 

 and devotes himself to the one element of 

 weight, which, so far as I know, no one 

 has questioned, provided the relative body- 

 weight is not allowed for between the sexes 

 as it is in the tables where men alone are 

 compared.* 



Dr. Hammond quotes from various writ- 

 ers on anthropology to prove points with 

 which my questions had nothing whatever to 

 do. Some of his quotations are from authors 

 whose theories are discredited by later in- 

 vestigations ; others are simply unsupported 

 assertions ; while his display of dialectic 

 pyrotechnics and personal innuendo are 

 both interesting and amusing even to me, 

 their victim, but they are certainly not ar- 

 gument. 



The doctor acknowledges that he can 

 not accept the offer I made him to distin- 

 guish the male from the female brains of 

 twenty specimens marked in cipher thus 

 corroborating my position and that of the 

 able and unprejudiced anatomists and phy- 

 sicians who assured me that there exist no 

 sufficient data upon which to make the bold 

 (and to use the doctor's own words) " rough- 

 and-tumble" assertions which have been 

 made by him as to the " radical and easily , 

 to be discovered characteristic 6ex differ- 

 ences in brains." To cover this, he makes 

 a proposition to me, which is entirely aside 

 from the question at issue, and in the face 

 of the fact that I have never said that I 

 could perform any of these wonderful feats. 



I am quite willing to say that I can not. 

 And since the science of anthropology is as 

 yet in its infancy ; since its various students 

 disagree ; and since within the past few 

 months one of its cardinal principles has 

 been found to be unsound, I am all the less 

 willing to accept the sweeping statements 

 of Dr. Hammond in regard to his being 



* See Le Bon, " Schwalbo Neurologie." 



BODY-HEIGHT. BRATN-WEIOHT. 



148-158 centimetres. 1,289 grammes. 



158-163 " 1.328 " 



168-173 " 1,373 



178-182 " 1,387 



able to tell " at once the difference between 

 a male and a female brain " by " numerous, 

 easily-discovered, natural sex differences " ; 

 because of which differences he asserts both 

 the incapacity of woman to learn and the 

 danger of allowing her to attempt studies 

 and occupations which he holds are unsuit- 

 ed to her lower brain organization. 



It is just here that I join issue with 

 him. And I maintain that no anatomist or 

 physician has a right to assume these radi- 

 cal differences to exist, and, upon insuffi- 

 cient and conflicting data, make positive 

 statements calculated to restrict woman in 

 the use of whatever brain capacity she may 

 have. 



He finds woman's brain deficient m gray 

 matter he says. Why deficient ? Because 

 man has more than she, and of course he is 

 always assumed to be the highest type. 

 But in this connection I find that Meynert 

 says, " It " (the gray substance) " is more 

 abundant in the brains of animals than in 

 that of man, and indeed the proportion of 

 gray substance increases the more remote the 

 brain-type is from the human." The italics 

 are mine. 



"A nervous impulse takes, according 

 to Helmholtz, about twelve times as long to 

 travel through the gray substance as it does 

 to be transmitted through the peripheral 

 nerves." Ibid. 



Is this a reason why women are said to 

 think more rapidly than men, or to have 

 " intuitions " which, Dr. Hammond gracious- 

 ly says, " stand her in good stead for 

 thought " ? 



The doctor once more uses as illustra- 

 tion the " well-known fact " that these char- 

 acteristic brain differences are greater be- 

 tween the sexes, and more to woman's dis- 

 credit, the higher we go in the scale of 

 civilization.* This he uses again as evi- 

 dence that woman has not utilized the op- 

 portunities which she has never been al- 

 lowed to have. But here comes a few 

 weeks ago the news that the assumption 

 upon which this is based is all wrong. 



The Terra del Fuegans' brains have 

 been used to illustrate the low organization 

 of brain possessed by the lower races of 

 man. It was assumed that the anatomical 



differences between their brains and ours 



i 



* This does not agree with Huschke and Le 

 Bon. oven upon the old theory and estimates. 



The German average brain-weight is given as 

 superior to the French, the former being 1,416 

 grammes and the latter 1..33S. yet the estimated 

 difference between the sexes is 222 grammes, for 

 the French, and only 130 for the Germans. 



