44 OBSERVATIONS AND MEASUREMENTS ACADEMY MEMBERS IMEMO ft s OL N S' 



not uniform in all the three main directions, but was realized most in the breadth, less in the 

 length, and least — in fact not at all, as seen under the measurement itself — in the height of their 

 skull. This must not be taken, however, for any selectivity in the head growth but only as a 

 result of the differences in the mechanical resistances in the several directions. 



The Face 



In anthropometry on the living we recognize two "faces"; namely, the conventional or 

 physiognomic, and the anatomical. The physiognomic face includes the forehead, the anatom- 

 ical extends from the nasal root (nasion) downward. 



The first feature of the physiognomic face that calls for attention is the forehead, which, 

 though belonging to the vault, forms an important constituent of the "visage" or face, in the 

 ordinary understanding of the word. This part has already been dealt with in part under vis- 

 ual observations, but there remain to be considered its actual measurements. There are two 

 important measurements of the forehead in the living — the height from nasion to hair line or 

 arc and the smaller frontal breadth (diameter frontal minimum). The first regrettably was 

 possible on only a rather small number of the members of the Academy, a large majority having 

 suffered more or less loss of hair above the forehead; nevertheless there were interesting results. 

 These results have already been partly utilized and published, 30 in view of which the table of 

 facts with a few remarks here will be sufficient. 



Table 34. — Height of forehead 

 [Nasion-Crinion] ' 



1 Point in the middle of the normal arc of the hair; where the hair in the middle descends in more or less of an angle, this is disregarded, the 

 hair arc is visually reconstructed and the measurement is taken to its midpoint as usual. 



The members of the Academy are seen to be identical in the height of the forehead with the 

 old Americans at large and even with the Tennessee highlanders, who stand on the lowest cultural 

 scale of the old American whites in general. The valuelessness of the height of the forehead as 

 a criterion of intellectuality is further shown by the fact that the forehead is actually slightly 

 higher in the male American Indian than in the academicians; more so in the Negro, and even 

 more so in the Eskimo. 31 The height of the forehead, under normal conditions, depends essen- 

 tially on the higher or lower extension of the hair over the front of the head. 



BREADTH OF THE FOREHEAD 



The most practicable breadth measurement on the forehead in the living is what is known as 

 the smallest frontal diameter, which is the distance between the points of the closest approach on 

 the temporal ridges above the bases of the two zygomatic processes of the frontal bone. This 

 dimension depends in a measure on the breadth of the skull, but this correlation falls considerably 

 short of parallelism. 32 The results of the measurement will be seen in the next tables. 



» Hrdlifka (A.): The Forehead. Proc. Am. Philos. Soc, 1933, LXXII, 315 et sen,.; reprinted in Smithsonian Rep. for 1934. 

 »' Ibid., p. 319. 

 » Ibid., p. 239. 



