MEASURES OF MENTAL CAPACITY, 73 



general measure of the position of a vertebrate species in the scale 

 of cerebral and mental development. As a mere " general rule," to 

 which, as is familiarly said, " there are always exceptions," it is cer- 

 tainly invulnerable, and is too valuable to be dispensed with. Hence, 

 naturalists, while declaring it to be unreliable, have made a general 

 application of it to the species of vertebrates, and to the races of man- 

 kind. Not only so — they have attempted to find out the definite 

 grains of allowance in its application to particular cases, to discover 

 the corresponding defects in the instrument, and to correct, improve, 

 and perfect it. May it not be that the mistake is not so much in 

 the facial angle as in the misunderstanding of its significance ? If 

 this can be shown, naturalists and ethnologists ought to make haste to 

 receive the much-honored and much-abused facial angle into more 

 hearty favor than ever. 



But it will hardly do to proceed to this pleasant task before stop- 

 ping to notice the proposition of the article entitled " The Facial An- 

 gle," in the March number of The Popular Science Monthly, to 

 replace Camper's facial angle by another and better. The writer 

 repudiates the angle of the frontal line with the base-line of the face, 

 and proposes to supersede it by an angle of the frontal line with the 

 axis of the body. He says, what everybody will admit, that the 

 frontal line of the face is on a line with the axis of the body or spii J 

 column, in the lowest vertebrates, and that the two lines are parallel 

 with each other in man. The absurdity of finding a facial angle, or 

 any other angle, between two parallel lines, is evident at a glance. It 

 might take two or three glances, but no more, to convince the ordinary 

 mind that those two lines, with the cerebrum and cerebellum between 

 them, cannot come in contact with each other, and can therefore form 

 no angle between them, even in the lower animals. Disregarding the in- 

 terposition of the brain, and extending the front line of the face and the 

 axial line of the body, in imagination, until they meet, the intersected 

 angle is not facial, and in the anthropoids it is so high in the air over- 

 head as to be essentially visionary. Perhaps this is the reason why 

 we have to look in vain at the only facial angles represented in the 

 article referred to. Figs. 2 and 3, to find an illustration of the new 

 facial angle proposed, concluding finally that they were intended to 

 illustrate the old one. The truth is, supposing the brain to unite, in- 

 stead of separate, the frontal line of the face and the axial line of the 

 body, the bending of the continuous right line formed by them in the 

 lowest vertebrate fishes into the two parallel lines in man, the one 

 facio-abdominal and the other occipito-dorsal, is not by angles at all, 

 but by curvatures, and the union of the parallels is by an arch over 

 the head. The arc in each case is a greater or less part of a circle, 

 according to the grade of intellectual and moral development. For 

 example : In the typical man, the facial and dorsal lines, being parallel 

 and perpendicular, are united at the top by a semicircle, very nearly 



