ARTICLE IV. 



A STUDY OF THE BKAINS OF SIX EMINENT SCIENTISTS AND SCHOLARS BE- 

 LONGING TO THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOMETRIC SOCIETY, TOGETHER 

 WITH A DESCRIPTION OF THE SKULL OF PROFESSOR E. D. COPE. 



By Edav. Anthony Spitzka, M.D., 



Peofhssoe of General Anatomy, Jefferson Medical College, Late Fellow and 

 Demonstrator of Anatomy, Columbia University. 



(Read March 16, 1906.) 



" Den Kiirper lasst oSnen ; es gewabrt diess vielleicht einigen Nntzen. Findet sieh ein Theil, der 

 den Aerzten Belebiung gewahren kann, so nebme man ihn In eine anatomische Sammlung auf." 



— From Tiedemann's will (1861). 



It is owing to the courage and wise forethought of certain advanced thinkers and 

 fruitful contributors to science that the brains of members of the American Anthropo- 

 metric Society have become available for scientific study. Occasionally an individual 

 has directed his nearest of kin to arrange for the preservation of his brain ; such men 

 were Tiedemann, Grote and the two Seguins. But not until the Mutual Autopsy 

 Society of Paris was founded in 1881 was this most legitimate claim of science met 

 by the establishment of an association formed for the express purpose of securing elite 

 brains for scientific study. On this side of the Atlantic, the American Anthropo- 

 metric Society was the pioneer association founded on similar lines, followed by the 

 Cornell Brain Association under the leadership of Prof Burt G. Wilder. Not many 

 years after the celebrated Retzius, of Stockholm, in view of the rather negative results 

 of older investigators in the field of cerebral morphology, and with the wish of satis- 

 fying himself whether the brains of persons of superior intellectual capacity were or 

 were not to be distinguished from ordinary brains by special anatomical characters, 

 proposed, in conjunction with the physiologist Tigerstedt, that his colleagues bequeath 

 their brains for scientific purposes. The forms of bequest received the signatures of 

 just two men : Retzius and Tigerstedt. Better results had been obtained by the 

 Mutual Autopsy Society of Paris which now possesses ten brains or more, among them 

 those of Gambetta, Bertillon, Veron and de Mortillet. The Cornell Brain Association 

 has bequeathed to it about seventy brains of educated, orderly persons, of which thir- 

 teen are already preserved in the Neurological Laboratory at Cornell. There is a 



A. p. S.— XXI. T. 10, 10. '07. 175 



