ON THE PEOPLE OF THE LONG-BARROW PERIOD. 355 



ordinarily supposed to apply, mutatis mutandis. Broca, in his in- 

 teresting paper on the 'Caverne de 1' Homme Mort,' says 1 : 'L'un 

 des traits les plus remarquables de la serie de T Homme Mort, c'est 

 la grande capacite relative du crane des femmes/ The head of 

 the female occupants of this cavern, like the head of the rustic 

 Dalecarlian females, as observed upon by Retzius, was but little — 

 some 99-50 cub. cent. (6 cubic inches)— inferior in capacity to that 

 of their male fellow Troglodytes, whilst the difference between the 

 modern Frenchman of Paris and the modern Frenchwoman is more 

 than twice as great as this amount. Where a woman is told by 

 symbols, no less than by precepts, as Tacitus tells us 2 the German 

 women were told, ' venire se laborum periculorumque sociam, idem 

 in pace idem in praelio passuram ausuramque,' it is easy to under- 

 stand, upon the principle of natural selection, how an equality, or, 

 at least, a near approach to equality, in the physical, as well as in 

 the moral and mental character of the sexes, may come to prevail, 

 and how the weight and stature of the entire body in the female 

 sex may approximate to the proportion of the male sex. Such, 

 however, is rarely the case in savage tribes and times, and what 

 we usually find, both among modern savages, as testified to by 

 Weisbach 3 , and among prehistoric men, as I have found, is an 

 exaggeration in the females of the disproportion which exists, even 

 in civilised races, between their brain and their entire body weight, 

 to the disfavour of the latter, which is relatively heavier in the 

 other sex. 



Without going into the familiar statistics which, tell us that the 

 brain attains very nearly its full weight at a very early age, I will 

 just add that the average circumference of the head is shown by 

 Liharzig 4 to be but about an inch less in either sex at the age of four- 

 teen than it is in adult life, the measurements being 54 as against 

 57 centimetres for the male, and 52-5 as against 5$-$ for the female 

 sex. Now, when the differences in treatment and mode of life, 

 which have already been alluded to as accounting for the dispro- 



1 'Revue d' Anthropologic' ii. 1, p. 45, 1873; and 'Bull. Soc. Anth.,' Paris, torn, 

 viii. ser. ii. p. 832, 1874. 



2 'Gerinania,' 18. 



3 'Reise der Novara,' 1867, ' Anthrop. Theil,' s. 222. 



* * Das Gesetz des Wachsthumes,' Taf. vi. ; which table shows also that the 

 female head is, at 21 months, 48^ centimetres in circumference as against 50 for the 

 male. 



a a 2 



