were so marked and so well known as to be quite beyond further dispute.
The latest test reveals the somewhat startling fact that these great race differences, even, are unproved assumptions, and the Terra del Fuegan brain is now said to possess proportions and characteristics that in no way enable anatomists to distinguish it from that of a Caucasian of the higher races. Here is a revelation, indeed, as to the state of anthropological knowledge! Now all this is frankly stated and acknowledged by the able brain anatomists who have no axe to grind, and are anxious to follow truth, even though it may confound their own theories.
This latest discovery in anthropology gives a pretty clear hint as to the accuracy of the information to be had, not only as to sex differences, but as to whether "these sex differences are greater the higher we go in civilization."
Since the foundation itself is knocked from under the theory, it looks as if the superstructure also may possibly need to undergo more or less repair at no distant day. This is what I contend for. Not because I pretend to be a brain anatomist, nor even a thorough student of anthropology. I have made no such claim; but I have said, and I now repeat, that those who are both of these (and whose standing as such I do not feel called upon to defend against Dr. Hammond's "fine and noble scorn," more especially since one of these very men was recently referred to by him as "the leading brain-anatomist in New York"), who are careful and honest brain students and anatomists, assure me that the present state of knowledge can not justify any one in making the sweeping statements made by Dr. Hammond as to the "numerous, striking, easily to be detected sex differences in brain."
The doctor invites me, in a tone of triumph (although I repeat this is not the question, and no amount of rhetorical dust can hide that fact), to find in all the records a woman's brain which weighs as much as Dr. Chalmers's (fifty-three ounces). Then he asserts that no woman's brain has ever been weighed in all the world which, if healthy, weighed over fifty-six ounces, while Cuvier's (whose brain, by-the-way, he does not mention, was not a healthy one, and that a part of its weight was due to that sad fact), and Abercrombie's weighed more than fifty-six ounces, and Webster's, Lord Campbell's, and Spurzhiem's, came within two or three ounces of weighing as much.
Now, so far as I am able to learn from books and from the profession, the brain of no remarkable woman has ever yet been weighed, to pit against those of these remarkable men. The brain of a Sappho, a George Eliot, or an Elizabeth Cady Stanton, might possibly make as fair a show as those of these gentlemen; but, unfortunately, woman's brain is, at the present time, labeled to fit the tramps, hospital subjects, and unfortunates, whose brains have, so far, been weighed and analyzed, and these are what are held up as the fair representative of woman and her capabilities, as against the Cuviers, Websters, and Byrons.
I assure Dr. Hammond that I am quoting a gentleman of his profession, and a friend of his, when I say "this is wholly unjust and absurd. It is simply no test at all." But in this connection it is only fair to state that, taking both sexes in this class of brains—hospital and unfortunates—Weisbach found that in the frontal lobes, which Dr. Hammond says is the intellectual part of the brain,[1] the female brains were relatively larger than the males. The per cent being, males, 87·86, and females, 88·03;[2] while Meynert reports the cerebellum in this class of brains to be exactly alike in the sexes—4112 per cent each.
It is a significant fact that Welker and the more recent Italian writers differ 100 grammes in their estimate of the weight of Dante's brain. If this enormous variation of estimate is possible in an individual brain, it seems not wholly impossible that there may be room for corrections in estimates made on sex differences where it is only claimed that these same 100 grammes exist as an estimated sex difference covering many cases, nations, and conditions, and containing brains of only the most ordinary women.
But the doctor says, "Now let Miss Gardener and the twenty leading brain anatomists, etc., search the records of anthropology and their own immense collections for the brain of a woman weighing as much as the least of these—Dr. Chalmers." There is in Dr. E. C. Spitzka's collection a female brain to meet even this unreasonable requirement, and she was not a remarkable woman either. Unimportant as she was to the world, she not only met Dr. Chalmers, but gave a point or two in the matter of weight to Lord Campbell, Daniel Webster, and Spurzheim. Her brain weighed 54 ounces. Now I trust that
- ↑ I give these authorities, fully recognizing that in this case it is against my point to do so. Munk says, "Intelligence is located everywhere in the cerebral cortex, and nowhere in particular." "I wish to add, in corroboration of this view," says Meynert, "that no author of the present day would be likely to insist on one special seat of memory, for memory is the common property of all cortical cells and fibers, which are able to receive and conduct external stimuli of all sorts." When Meynert said "No writer of the present day would be likely to insist," etc., he did not know Dr. Hammond.
- ↑ "Pfleger insists on the relatively greater development of the hemispheres in man as compared with those of woman, the exact relation being as 795 to 787 on the scale of 1,000. Engel has shown that this assigns the larger cerebellum to woman during the prime of life."—Meynert's "Psychiatry," p. 56.
