CAPACITY FOR SCIENTIFIC PURSUITS 115 



through their indomitable wills, able to send forth from 

 their bleak home in the wild Yorkshire moors works of 

 genius that still instruct and delight the world. 



From the foregoing it is clear that valetudinarianism, if 

 it prove anything, proves not that it renders intellectual 

 effort impossible, but that it serves as a discipline for the 

 soul. It forces the mind to husband its strength, and thus 

 enables it to accomplish by economy and concentration of 

 effort that which the same mind in a healthy body, with the 

 distractions of society and the allurements of life, would 

 be unable to accomplish. It exemplifies in the most strik- 

 ing manner the truth of what Socrates says in Plato 's Re- 

 public about the beneficent action of the " bridle of 

 Theages," preventing an infirm friend of his from em- 

 bracing politics and keeping him true to his first love 

 philosophy. 



Failing to show any necessary connection between supe- 

 rior physique and intellectual capacity, between health of 

 body and mental activity, between the amount of food 

 consumed and the degree of intelligence, the class of think- 

 ers whose theories are now under consideration found them- 

 selves forced to abandon the argument based on robust 

 health and physical strength and seek elsewhere for sup- 

 port of their views. This, they soon announced, was found 

 in the greater cranial capacity and greater brain weight of 

 the male as compared with that of the female. Following 

 up this fancied clew, anthropologists the world over be- 

 gan measuring skulls and weighing brains in order to de- 

 termine the supposed ratio of sex-difference. 



The results of these investigations were far from cor- 

 roborating the preconceived notions of those who had fan- 

 cied a necessary correlation between mental capacity and 

 size of cranium, between the weight of encephalon and de- 

 gree of intelligence. For it was soon discovered that cran- 

 ial capacity depended on many causes many of them un- 

 known and that people having the largest skulls were 



