M 



NA tURE 



[Sept. 2, 1875 



Wiltshire, in the Memoirs of the London Anthropological 

 Society for 1865 ; and the names of Les Eyzies and Cro-Magnon, 

 and of the Caverne de I'Homme Mort, to which we may add 

 that of Solutre, remind us that the first of these facts has been 

 confirmed, and the second both indicated and abundantly com- 

 mented upon by M. Broca. 



The impression which these facts" make upon one, "when one 

 first comes to realise them, is closely similar to that which is 

 made by the first realisation to the mind of the existence of a 

 subtropical flora in Greenland in Miocene times. All our antici- 

 pations are precisely reversed, and in each case by a weight of 

 demonstration equivalent to such a work ; there is no possibility 

 in either case of any mistake ; and we acknowledge that all that 

 we had expected is absent, and that where we had looked for 

 poverty and pinching there we ceme upon luxurious and exube- 

 rant growth. The comparisons we draw in either case between 

 the past and the present are not wholly to the advantage of the 

 latcer : still such are the facts. Philologists will thank me for 

 reminding them of Mr. Chauncy Wright's brilliant suggestions 

 that the large relative size of brain to body which distinguishes, 

 and always, so far as we know, has distinguished the human 

 species as compared with the species most nearly related to it, 

 may be explained by the psychological tenet that the smallest 

 proficiency in the faculty of language may "require more brain 

 power than the greatest in any other direction," and that " we 

 do not know and have no means of knowing what is the quan- 

 tity of intellectual power as measured by brains which even the 

 simplest use of language requires. * 



And for the explanation of the pre-eminently large size of the 

 brains of these particular representatives of our species, the 

 tenants of prehistoric sepulchres, we have to bear in mind, first, 

 that they were, as the smallness of their numbers and the large- 

 ness of the tumuli lodging them may be taken to prove, the 

 chiefs of their tribes ; and, secondly, that modern savages have 

 been known, and prehistoric savages may therefore be supposed, 

 to have occasionally elected their chiefs to their chieftainships 

 upon grounds furnished by their superior fitness for such posts — 

 that is to say, for their superior energy and ability. Some per- 

 sons may find it difficult to believe this, though such facts are 

 deposed to by most thoroughly trustworthy travcliei-s, such as 

 Baron Osten Sacken, referred to by Von Bacr, in the Report of the 

 famous Anthropological Congress at Gottingen, in 1861, p. 22. 

 And they may object to accepting it, for, among other reasons, 

 this reason — to wit, that Mr. Galton has shown us in his "Men 

 of Science, their Nature and Nurture," p. 98, that men of great 

 energy and activity (that is to say just the very men fitted to act 

 as leaders of and to commend themselves to savages)+ have ordi- 

 narily smaller-sized heads than men possessed of intellectual 

 power dissociated fi-om those qualities. 



The objection I specify, as well as those which I allude to, 

 may have too much weight assigned to them ; but we can waive 

 this discussion and put our feet on firm ground when we say that 

 in all savage communities the chiefs have a larger share of food 

 and other comforts, such as there are in savage life, and have 

 consequently better and larger frames — or, as the Rev. S. Whit- 

 mee puts it [I.e.), when observing on the fact as noticed by him 

 in Polynesia, a more "portly bearing." This (which, as the 

 size of the brain increases within certain proportions with the 

 increase of the size of the body, is a material fact in every sense) 

 has been testified to by a multitude of other observers, and is, to 

 my mind, one of the most distinctive marks of savagery as 

 opposed to civilisation. It is only in times of civilisation that 

 men of the puny stature of Ulysses or Agesilaus are allowed 

 their proper place in the management of affairs. And men of 

 such physical size, coupled with such mental calibre, may take 

 comfort, if they need it, from the purely quantitative conside- 

 ration, that large as are the individual skulls from prehistoric 

 graves, and high, too, as is the average obtained from a number 

 of them, it has nevertheless not been shown that the largest indi- 

 vidual skulls of those days were larger than, or, indeed, as large 

 as the best skulls of our own days ; whilst the high average 

 capacity which the former series shows is readily explicable by 

 the very obvious consideration that the poorer specimens of 

 humanity, if allowed to live at all in those days, were, at any 

 rate, when dead not allowed sepulture in the "tombs of the 

 * The bibliographer will thank me also for pointing out to him that the 

 important paper in the North American Review for October 1870, p. 295, 

 from which 1 have just quoted, has actually escaped the wonderfully 

 exhaustive research of Dr. Seidlitz (see his " Darwin'sche Theorie," 1875). 

 + Ad inieresting and instructive story in illustration of the kind of quali- 

 s which do recommend a man to savages, is told us by Sir Bartle Frere 

 his pamphlet, " Christianity suited to all forms of Civilisation," pp. 12-14. 



kings," from which nearly exclusively we obiain our prehistoric 

 crania. M. Broca * has given us yet further ground for retaining 

 our self-complacency by showing, from his extensive series of 

 measurements of the crania from successive epochs in Parisian 

 burial-places, that the average capacity has gone on steadily 

 increasing. 



It may be suggested that a large brain, as calculated by the 

 cubage of the skull, may nevertheless have been a comparatively 

 lowly organised one, from having its molecular constitution quali- 

 tatively inferior from the neuroglia being developed to the disad- 

 vantage of the neurine, or from having its convolutions few and 

 simple, and being thus poorer in the aggregate mass of its grey 

 ossicular matter. It is perhaps impossible to dispose absolutely 

 of either of these suggestions. But, as regards the first, it seems 

 to me to be exceedingly improbable that such could have been 

 the case. For in cases where an overgrowth of neuroglia has 

 given the brain increase of bulk without giving it increase of its 

 true nervous elements, the Scotch proverb, " Muckle brain, 

 mickle wit, " applies ; and the relatively inferior intelligence of 

 the owners of such brains as seen nowadays may, on the prin- 

 ciple of continuity, be supposed to have attached to the owners 

 of such brains in former times. But those times were times of 

 a severer struggle for existence than even the present ; and 

 inferior intelligences, and specially the inferior quickness and 

 readiness observable in such cases, it may well be supposed, 

 would have fared worse then than now. There is, however, 

 no need for this supposition, for, as a matter of fact, the brain- 

 case of brains so hypertrophied t has a very recognisable shape 

 of its own, and this shape is not the shape of the Cro-Magnon 

 skull, nor indeed of any of the prehistoric skulls with whicli I 

 am acquainted. 



As regards the second suggestion to the effect that a large 

 braincase may have contained a brain the convolutions of which 

 were simple, broad, and coarse, and which made up by conse- 

 quence a sheet of grey matter of less square area than that made 

 up in a brain of similar size, but of more complex and slenderer 

 convolutions, I have to say that it is possible this may have been 

 the case, but that it seems to me by no means likely. Very large 

 skulls arc sometimes found amongst collections purporting to 

 have come from very savage or degraded races ; such a skull 

 may be seen in the London Colle^je of Surgeons with a label, 

 "5357 ^- Bushman, G. Williams. Presented by Sir John 

 Lubbock ;" and, from what Prof. Marshall and Gratiolet have 

 taught us as to other Bushman brains, smaller, it is true, in size, 

 we may be inclined to think that the brain which this large skull 

 once contained may nevertheless have been much simpler in its 

 convolutions than a European brain of similar size would 

 be. This skull, however, is an isolated instance of such propor- 

 tions amongst Bushman skulls, so far, at least, as I have 

 been able to discover ; whilst the skulls of prehistoric times, 

 though not invariably, are yet most ordinarily large skulls. A 

 large brain with coarse convolutions puts its possessor at a di^ad- 

 vaniage in the struggle for existence, as its greater size is not 

 compensated by greater dynamical activity ; and hence I should 

 be slow to explain the large size of ancient skulls by suggesting 

 that they contained brains of this negative character. And I am 

 glad to see that M. Broca is emphatically of this opinion, and 

 that, after a judicious statement of the whole case, he expresses 

 himself thus (/vdOT^i! cT Anthropologic, ii. I, 38) : — " Kien ne per- 

 met done de supposer que les rapports de la masse encephalique 

 avec I'intelligence fussent autres chez eux que chez nous." 



It is by a reference to the greater severity of the struggle for 

 existence and to the lesser degree to which the principle of 

 division of labour was carried out in olden days, that M. Broca, 

 in his paper on the " Caverne de I'Homme Mort," just quoted 

 from, explains the fact of the subequality of the skulls in the two 

 sexes. This is an adequate explanation of the facts ; but to the 

 facts as already stated, I can add from my own experience the 

 fact that though the female skulls of prehistoric times are often 

 they are not always equal, or nearly, to those of the male sex of 

 those times ; and, secondly, that whatever the relative size of the 

 head, the limbs and trunk of the female portion of those tribes 

 were, as is still the case with modem savages, very usually dis- 

 proportionately smaller than those of the male. This is 



* See his paper " Bull. Soc. Anthrop. de Paris," t. iii. ser. i. 1862, p. 102 ; 

 or his collected " Memoires,"^vol. i. p. 348, 1871. 



t I may, perhaps, be allowed to express here my surprise at the statement 

 made by Messrs Wilks and Moxon, in their very valuable "Pathological 

 Anatomy," pp. 217, 218, to the effect that they have not met with such cases 

 of cerebral hypertrophy. They were common enough at the Children's 

 Hospital in Great Ormond Street when I was attached to it. 



