896 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 



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 

 Tydeus or Agesilaus are allowed their proper place in the manage- 

 ment of affairs. And men of such physical size, coupled with such 

 mental calibre, may take comfort, if they need it, from the purely 

 (juantitative consideration, 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 individual 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 speci- 

 mens 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 

 kings,' from which nearly exclusively we obtain 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 dis- 

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

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

 vesicular 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, little wit,' 

 applies ; and the relatively inferior intelligence of the owners of 

 such brains as seen nowadays may, on the principle of continuity, 

 be supposed to have attached to the owners of such brains in 



^ See his paper, 'Bull. Soc. Anthrop. de Paris,' t. iii. ser. i. 1862, p, 102; or his 

 collected 'M^moires,' vol. i p. 34S, 1871. 



