5 o8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



they are, owing to their persecutions, the shortest of all European 

 folk, their relative superiority in brain comes out even more strik- 

 ingly. 



The conclusion I have thus drawn from anthropological data 

 receives remarkable confirmation from the results of an inquiry I 

 made on the Comparative Distribution of Jewish Ability, and con- 

 tributed to the Anthropological Institute in 1886. Applying the 

 methods of Galton, I compared the celebrities produced by the 

 Jewish race during the last hundred years with those of English- 

 men and Scotchmen, and came to the conclusion that the race, as a 

 whole, took rank between Scotchmen and Englishmen in intellec- 

 tual capacity, while if the comparison had been confined to western 

 Jews, who alone have had an opportunity of displaying their tal- 

 ents, they would have come out superior to both. From the an- 

 thropological side we should expect that the brachycephalism of 

 Jews would show itself in superior mental capacity, and this is con- 

 firmed by the number of distinguished persons of Jewish blood re- 

 corded in the European dictionaries of biography. 



The anthropological and sociological importance of this result, 

 if confirmed by further inquiry, seems to me of very great signifi- 

 cance for the science of anthropology, and for this reason I have 

 insisted so much upon it. Skull capacity and cephalic index are 

 not so much indications of race as of intellect. If it is found that, 

 as a rule, each race, and even each people, tends to have a uniform 

 cephalic index, that would merely imply that the sociological con- 

 ditions of the said race or people were tolerably uniform as regards 

 intellectual development. Australians, who have had no oppor- 

 tunity of pitting their wits against any other competing race, and 

 have depended for their existence on the fleetness of their legs and 

 the capacity of their stomachs to carry food from one orgy to an- 

 other, have used their brains less than all other human races, and 

 have the narrowest skulls of all. Teutons, who have had the largest 

 sphere for intellectual rivalry with their neighbors, have the 

 broadest skulls of all except the Jews, who have, so to speak, lived 

 by their wits the last two thousand years. The evidence produced 

 by Professor Ripley of long-headed Jews among the lower devel- 

 oped communities only shows that where the brain is not much ex- 

 ercised the skull is not broadened. 



So far, then, from history and anthropology giving contrary 

 verdicts with regard to the racial purity of the Jews, the above 

 considerations would seem to show that they rather confirm one 

 another's interpretation of the facts. If brain capacity and skull 

 index follow the intellectual struggle for existence, we should not 

 be surprised to find the Jews mostly broad-headed. If there had 



