134 THE HUMAN SKULL 



intellectual capacity is to be found in the measure- 

 ments of the heads of a group of thirty-six ana- 

 tomical teachers in universities and medical 

 schools which were taken at a meeting held in 

 Dublin in 1897. Amongst these gentlemen were 

 a few Germans and Belgians, as well as Irish, 

 English and Scotch. Well, the result, so far as the 

 horizontal index is concerned, is very curious. 

 Amongst so few persons there is a range from 86.5, 

 the most brachycephalic, to 72.2, the most dolicho- 

 cephalic, and between those figures every gap is 

 filled up, that is to say, there is no complete 

 numeral unrepresented, some measuring 85 odd, 

 some 84 odd, and so on to the lowest. As a matter 

 of fact, fifteen in the list were brachycephalic, 

 fourteen mesocephalic and seven dolichocephalic. 

 The late Canon Isaac Taylor, in his book on The 

 Origin of the Aryans, tried to show that the shape 

 of the head had something to do with intellectual 

 faculties, and even with the form of religion pro- 

 fessed by its owner. He tells his readers that the 

 dolichocephalic Teutons are Protestant,the brachy- 

 cephalic French Catholic, and the mesocephalic 

 Englishman neither one nor the other, but some- 

 thing between the two, which, as he is writing a 

 scientific book, he does not try to define. Now 

 the Canon was not right in his fundamental facts, 

 for England is predominantly dolichocephalic, as 

 Ripley has shown, and not mesocephalic ; but if 

 he had been right in this statement, the facts which 

 I have brought forward will show how absurd and 

 useless it is to attempt to gauge the intellectual 

 characters of its owner by the length and breadth 



