"His mental development is arrested,
and thenceforth he grows backwards instead of forwards." Now it is
nervous work contradicting
These statements, but with all due
respect to the makers of them I must do so, and I have the comfort
of knowing that many men with a larger personal experience of the
African than these authorities have, agree with me, although at the
same time we utterly disclaim holding the opinion that the African
is a man and a brother. A man he is, but not of the same species;
and his cranial sutures do, I agree, close early; indeed I have seen
them almost obliterated in skulls of men who have died quite young;
but I think most anthropologists are nowadays beginning to see that
the immense value they a few years since set upon skull measurements
and cranial capacity, etc., has been excessive and not to have so
great a bearing on the intelligence as they thought. There has been
an enormous amount of material carefully collected, mainly by
Frenchmen, on craniology, which is exceedingly interesting, but full
of difficulty, and giving very diverse indications. Take the
weights of brain given by Topinard: -
and I think you will see for practical purposes such considerations
as weight of brain, or closure of sutures, etc., are negligible, and
so we need not get paralysed with respect for "physiological
causes." Moreover I may remark that the top-weight, the Hottentot,
was a lady, and that M. Broca weighed one negro's brain which scaled
1,500 grammes, while 105 English and Scotchmen only gave an average
of 1,427.
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