212 BEAIN-WEIGHT AND SIZE IN RELATION 



froze the genial current of the soul," it is manifest that other elements 

 besides those of volume or weight are essential as cerebral indices of 

 mental power. Dr. Thurnam, after noting examples that had come 

 under his own notice of brain- weights above the medium — but which, 

 as those of insane patients, may be assigned to other causes than 

 healthy cerebral development, — adds : " The heaviest brain weighed 

 by me (62 oz., or 1760 grms.) was that of an uneducated butcher, 

 who was just able to read, and who died suddenly of epilepsy, com- 

 bined with mania, after about a year's illness. The head was large, 

 but well-formed ; the brain of normal consistence ; the puncta vascu- 

 losa numerous." In cases like this, of weighty brain with no corre- 

 sponding manifestation of intellectual power, something else was 

 wanting besides a less circumscribed sphere. The mere position of a 

 humble artizan or labourer will not suf&ce to mar the capacity to 

 " make by force his merit known," which pertains to the " divinely 

 gifted man." 



Arkwright, Franklin, Watt, Stephenson, and others of the like 

 type of self-made men, are not rare. Among those large-brained 

 artizans, scarcely one can have had a more limited sphere for the 

 exercise of mental vigour than the poet Burns, the child of poverty 

 and toil, who refers to his own early years as passed in " the unceasing 

 moil of a galley-slave." In his case the very means essential to a 

 healthy physical development were stinted at the most critical period 

 ■of life. His brother Gilbert says: " We lived sparingly. For several 

 years butcher's meat was a stranger to the house ; while all exerted 

 themselves to the utmost of their strength, and rather beyond it, in 

 the labours of the farm. - My brother, at the age of thirteen, assisted 

 in thrashing the crop of com, and at fifteen was the principal labourer 

 on the farm." Such premature toil and privations left their perma- 

 nent stamp on his frame. " Externally, the consequences appeared 

 in a stoop of the shoulders, which never left him; but internally, 

 in the more serious form of mental depression, attended by a nervous 

 disorder which affected the movements of the heart." He had only 

 exchanged the toil on his father's farm for equally unremitting labour 

 on his own, when the finest of his poems were written ; nor would 

 it be inconsistent with all the facts to assume that the privations of 

 his early life diminished his capacity for continuous mental activity ; 

 as it undoubtedly impaired his physical constitution. But, while the 

 possession of a brain much above the average in size might have 



