CORRESP ONDENCE. 



699 



were so marked and so well known as to be 

 quite beyond further dispute. 



The latest test reveals the somewhat 

 startling fact that these great race differ- 

 ences, even, are unproved assumptions, and 

 the Terra del Fuegan brain is now said to 

 possess proportions and characteristics that 

 in no way enable anatomists to distinguish 

 it from that of a Caucasian of the higher 

 races. Here is a revelation, indeed, as to 

 the state of anthropological knowledge ! 

 Now all this is frankly stated and acknowl- 

 edged by the able brain anatomists who 

 have no axe to grind, and are anxious to fol- 

 low truth, even though it may confound their 

 own theories. 



This latest discovery in anthropology 

 gives a pretty clear hint as to the accuracy 

 of the information to be had, not only as to 

 sex differences, but as to whether " these sex 

 differences are greater the higher we go in 

 civilization." 



Since the foundation itself is knocked 

 from under the theory, it looks as if the su- 

 perstructure also may possibly need to un- 

 dergo more or less repair at no distant day. 

 This is what I contend for. Not because I 

 pretend to be a brain anatomist, nor even a 

 thorough student of anthropology. I have 

 made no such claim ; but I have said, and 

 I now repeat, that those who are both of 

 these (and whose standing as such I do not 

 feel called upon to defend against Dr. Ham- 

 mond's " fine and noble scorn," more espe- 

 cially since one of these very men was re- 

 cently referred to by him as " the leading 

 brain-anatomist in New York"), who are 

 careful and honest brain students and anato- 

 mists, assure me that the present state of 

 knowledge can not justify any one in mak- 

 ing the sweeping statements made by Dr. 

 Hammond as to the "numerous, striking, 

 easily to be detected sex differences in brain." 



The doctor invites me, in a tone of tri- 

 umph (although I repeat this is not the 

 question, and no amount of rhetorical dust 

 can hide that fact), to find in all the rec- 

 ords a woman's brain which weighs aa 

 much as Dr. Chalmers's (fifty-three ounces). 

 Then he asserts that no woman's brain has 

 ever been weighed in all the world which, 

 if healthy, weighed over fifty-six ounces, 

 while Cuvier's (whose brain, by-the-way, he 

 does not mention, was not a healthy one, 

 and that a part of its weight was due to 

 that sad fact), and Abercrombie's weighed 

 more than fifty-six ounces, and Webster's, 

 Lord Campbell's, and Spurzhiem's, came 

 within two or three ounces of weighing as 

 much. 



Now, so far as I am able to learn from 

 books and from the profession, the brain of 

 no remarkable woman has ever yet been 

 weighed, to pit against those of these re- 

 markable men. The brain of a Sappho, a 

 George Eliot, or an Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 



might possibly make as fair a show as those 

 of these gentlemen ; but, unfortunately, wo- 

 man's brain is, at the present time, labeled 

 to fit the tramps, hospital subjects, and un- 

 fortunates, whose brains have, so far, been 

 weighed and analyzed, and these are what 

 are held up aa the fair representative of 

 woman and her capabilities, as against the 

 Cuviers, Websters, and Byrons. 



I assure Dr. Hammond that I am quot- 

 ing a gentleman of his profession, and a 

 friend of his, when I say "this is wholly 

 unjust and absurd. It is simply no test at 

 all." But in this connection it is only fair to 

 state that, taking both sexes in this class of 

 brains hospital and unfortunates Weis- 

 bach found that in the frontal lobes, which 

 Dr. Hammond says is the intellectual part 

 of the brain,* the female brains were rela- 

 tively larger than the males. The per cent 

 being, males, 87'86, and females, 88'03 ;f 

 while Meynert reports the cerebellum in 

 this class of brains to be exactly alike in 

 the sexes 41-J- per cent each. 



It is a significant fact that Welker and 

 the more recent Italian writers differ 100 

 grammes in their estimate of the weight of 

 Dante's brain. If this enormous variation 

 of estimate is possible in an individual brain, 

 it seems not wholly impossible that there 

 may be room for corrections in estimates 

 made on sex differences where it is only 

 claimed that these same 100 grammes exist 

 as an estimated sex difference covering many 

 cases, nations, and conditions, and contain- 

 ing brains of only the most ordinary women. 



But the doctor says, "Now let Miss 

 Gardener and the twenty leading brain anat- 

 omists, etc., search the records of anthro- 

 pology and their own immense collections 

 for the brain of a woman weighing as 

 much as the least of these Dr. Chalmers." 

 There is in Dr. E. C. Spitzka's collection 

 a female brain to meet even this unreason- 

 able requirement, and she was not a re- 

 markable woman either. Unimportant as 

 she was to the world, she not only met Dr. 

 Chalmers, but gave a point or two in the 

 matter of weight to Lord Campbell, Daniel 

 Webster, and Spurzheim. Her brain 

 weighed 54 ounces. Now I trust that 



* I give these authorities, fully recognizing that 

 in this case it is against my point to do so. Munk 

 says, " Intelligence is located everywhere in the 

 cerebral cortex, and nowhere in particular." "I 

 wish to add, in corroboration of this view," says 

 Meynert, " that no author of the present day would 

 be likely to insist on one special seat of memory, 

 for memory is the common property of all cortical 

 cells and fibers, which are able to receive and con- 

 duct external stimuli of all sorts." When Meynert 

 said " No writer of the present day would be likely 

 to insist," etc., he did not know Dr. Hammond. 



+ " Pfleger insists on the relatively greater de- 

 velopment of the hemispheres in man as compared 

 with those of woman, the exact relation being as 

 795 to 787 on the scale of 1,000. Engel has shown 

 that this assigns the larger cerebellum to woman 

 during the prime of life." Meynert's "Psychia- 

 try," p. 66. 



