Literary Notices. iii 



grand effort to have psychiatric cUnics established in all the larger 

 cities will produce better means for a clinical treatment of the subject, 

 it will probably be easier for him to produce a live picture of the re- 

 sults and problems of psychiatry. Between traditions and impression- 

 ist methods, the general pathology of mental diseases has a long and 

 agitated infancy. 



ADOLF MEYER. 



Brain Weight and Mental Capacity. 



From the first dawn of anatomical knowledge theories as to the 

 relation between the brain and intelligence have possessed a peculiar 

 fascination for the student. Even where it has not run into such fan- 

 tastic extremes as phrenology and the early forms of localization, the 

 idea that there is some relation between the quantity of brain substance 

 and the psychic endowments of man has dominated our literature. It 

 is true that the few data that have been collected seem to show that 

 such a relation is far from constant. Among ethnologists it has come 

 to be an accepted dictum that, other things being equal, the brachy- 

 cephalic skull is characteristic of a higher intellectual development 

 than the longer, narrower skull. Some eminent men have been 

 blessed with extraordinary brain capacity and weight and a number 

 have had the way paved for this development by a skull-stretching at- 

 tack of hydrocephalus in youth. 



Nevertheless it is evident from the results of histological study 

 that there are other factors of greater moment than the actual or even 

 the relative size of the brain. It is difficult also to make the correct 

 allowance for the ratio of brain and body development. From all 

 analogy we should expect that the proportion between the size of the 

 brain and that of the body would be higher in short than in tall persons. 

 Francis O. Simpson, in the Journal of Mental Science of October, 

 1898, discusses the specific gravity of the insane brain, basing his 

 work on the earlier paper of Sonkey.^ Sonkey stated that the specific 

 gravity of the normal brain is, for the gray matter, 1034 and, for white 

 matter, 1041. Simpson made a series of determinations from the 

 brains of subjects who had died of general paralysis, senile dementia, 

 and other chronic degenerations and found that, while the specific 

 gravity varies in different parts of the brain, the gray substance aver- 

 ages 1039 in men and 1032 in women, while the white averages 1041 

 in both sexes. From this it would appear that the difference between 



» Brit, and Foreign Medico-Chirurg. Rev., 1853. 



