220 BRAIN-WEIGHT AND SIZE IN RELATION 



had domesticated animals, and trained them as beasts of burden. It 

 is not, therefore, -without reason that Dr. Morton adds : " When we 

 consider the institutions of the old Peruvians, their comparatively 

 advanced civilization, their tombs and temples, mountain roads and 

 monolithic gateways, together with their knowledge of certain orna- 

 mental arts, it is surprising to find that they possessed a brain no 

 larger than the Hottentot and l^ew Hollander, and far below that 

 of the barbarous hordes of their own race. For, on measuring 155 

 crania, nearly all derived from the sepulchres just mentioned, they 

 give but 75 cubic inches [equivalent, after due deduction for mem- 

 branes and fluids, to a brain of 40"1 oz. av. in weight,] for the aver- 

 age bulk of the brain. Of the whole number, only one attains the 

 capacity of 101 cubic inches, and the minimum sinks to 58, the 

 smallest in the whole series of 641 measured crania. It is important 

 further to remark that the sexes are nearly equally represented, ,viz., 

 eighty men and seventy-five women." 



Other collections subsequently formed have largely added to our 

 means of testing the curious question thus raised of the apparent 

 inverse ratio of volume of brain to intellectual power and progressive 

 civilization among the native races of the American continent. In 

 1866, Mr. E. G. Squier presented to the Peabody Museum of American 

 Archseology and Ethnology at Harvard, a collection of seventy- five 

 Peruvian skulls, obtained by himself from various localities both on 

 the coast and in the interior. " The skulls from the interior repre" 

 sent the Aymara on Lake Titicaca, as well as the Quichua, Cuzco, or 

 Inca families ; and the skulls of every coast family from Tumbes to 

 Atacama, or from Ecuador to Chili."* Subsequently the curator, 

 the late Professor Jefi'reys Wyman, made this collection, along with 

 two others, of skulls from the mounds of Kentucky and Florida, the 

 subject of careful comparative measurements. The following are the 

 results : 'The crania from Florida were chiefly obtained from a burial 

 place near an ancient Indian shell mound of gigantic proportions, a 

 few miles distant from Cedar Keys. They are eighteen in number, 

 and have a mean capacity of 1375-7 cubic centimetres, or nearly 84 

 cubic inches. The skulls from the Kentucky mounds, twenty-four 

 in number, show a mean capacity of 1313 cubic centimetres, 80-21 

 cubic inches, with a difierence of 125 cubic centimetres, or 7-61 cubic 

 inches in favour of the males. Yet, small as the Kentucky skulls 



' Peabody Museum Annual Report, 1868," p. 7. 



