Part 12

On the whole, then, before the coming on of the Glacial epoch, we may be pretty sure that plants and animals on the one hand had learned organically and automatically to recognize the existence of the year and to adapt themselves to it; and that men or the progenitors of men on the other hand had also learned to correlate the recurrent seasons of food supply with the movements of the sun, though nothing equivalent to winter and summer as we know them to-day existed as yet on any part of our planet. I say advisedly "on any part of our planet," because even near the pole itself remains of a subtropical vegetation in Tertiary times have been amply indicated. Nevertheless, in all parts of the world then, as in the tropics now, we may gather that plants and animals ran through annual cycles--that the year, as I have put it, was organically recognized. Trees had their time to sprout, to bud, to flower, to fruit, to seed, to shed their leaves (in the evergreen way); birds had their time to nest and hatch out their young; insects had their fixed periods for laying, for larval life, for assuming the chrysalis form, for becoming winged beetles or bees or butterflies. In one word, the year is a terrestrial reality, not merely an astronomical fact, in the tropics now; it was a terrestrial reality over the whole planet in the Tertiary period. But it was hardly more marked, apparently, into distinct seasons than it is marked to-day in the equatorial region. Rainfall and drought must have had more to do in determining the annual cycles than winter and summer.

From all this it must result that the conception of the year as an epoch at all (save for advanced astronomy) is almost or entirely due to that tilt of the earth's axis which causes the seasons--dry or wet, cold or hot. Without the seasons, in one form or other, we might have been ages longer in discovering the fact that the earth moved round the sun, and that some three hundred and sixty-five days (I omit those important fractions) were needed for its revolution. Certainly, without the seasons, at least to the extent that they occur in the tropics, plant and animal life could hardly have assumed its fixed annual cycles, nor could early men have caught at the idea of the year at all as a period of time, a unit of measurement.

Before the Glacial epoch, in particular, the discovery of the year, organically or consciously, must have been much more difficult than it is now in high latitudes. It must have been almost as difficult in what are now the temperate zones as it is to-day in the tropics. Far north or south, of course, the length of the day would tell; and within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles the long night would form an unmistakable feature. But if the plane of the equator had always found itself vertical to the sun, there could have been no recognition of the year at all, either organic or conscious. In other words, from the point of view of organic life, the year does not mean the revolution of the earth round the sun: it means the apparent northward and southward movement of the sun on either side of the equator; it means the seasons, whether recognized as winter and summer, or as dry and wet periods. That is really the year as man knows it, as plants and animals have always known it.

With the coming on of the great cold spell, however, the importance of the seasons in the temperate and frigid zones, perhaps also even in the tropics, became much more marked. I will not go here into the suggested reasons for that vast revolution, perhaps the greatest our planet has ever suffered. Most physicists now accept more or less the theory put forward with great ingenuity by Mr. Croll, which sets it down to a period of extreme eccentricity in the earth's orbit; but some weight must also be allowed, as Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace has clearly shown, to the local arrangement of land and water on the globe at the time of its origin, as well as to the occurrence of mountain ranges just then at the poles, and to other purely terrestrial causes. Never before, in all probability, had the poles been occupied by great glacier-clad mountains. It seems most likely, indeed, that we are now practically at the end of the Glacial epoch, and that if only we could once get rid of the polar ice caps, which keep a stock of chilliness always laid on (I speak the quite comprehensible language of everyday life), we might recur forthwith to the warm and almost imperceptible winters of the preglacial period. But, as things stand, the stock of ice at the poles never gets melted away in the existing northern or southern summer; fresh ice accumulates on top of the old mass with each winter; prevailing winds, blowing over this ice, chill regions lying much farther toward the tropics; icebergs detach themselves and float off, thus lowering the temperature of the sea in the middle zones; arctic or antarctic currents spread round the coasts and absorb the solar heat in enormous quantities. We have only to remember the trenchant difference in England between a parching cold east wind and a mild sou'wester to realize what an immense part these polar ice caps and frozen highlands play in the production of our existing winter. Alps, Pyrenees, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains, further assist in the same direction.

On the other hand, currents in the sea may cut either way; the Gulf Stream makes England warm, while the arctic current makes Labrador, much farther south, practically uninhabitable.

Ever since the Glacial epoch, therefore, it has been quite easy for man in the temperate and frigid zones to recognize the year as a natural reality. The annual cycles of heat and cold are far too marked to be overlooked by anybody. Organically, they made themselves felt at once by extraordinary changes induced in the fauna and flora. Before the steady advance of the annual cold wave, vegetation had perforce to alter its ways. The large-leaved evergreens went out altogether in frigid and high temperate regions; deciduous trees, or needle-leaved types like the pines and firs, took the place of the luxuriant Miocene foliage in Europe and North America. Every autumn the larger number of trees and shrubs learned to shed their leaves all together; every spring they came out anew in fresh green and in masses of blossom. Similarly with animals. Birds learned to migrate, or to accommodate themselves to the winter; insects learned to hibernate in the egg or the cocoon; pigs fattened themselves on mast against the frozen time; moles slept over winter; squirrels hoarded nuts for a store to bridge over heavy frosts; frogs retired to the warmer mud in the depths of ponds; adders coiled themselves in holes and dozed away the cold season. Innumerable adaptations sprang up at once, those species or individuals which failed to meet the new conditions perishing in the struggle. In proportion as we recede from the tropics, the more marked do the annual cycles of life thus induced become, many species practically ceasing to exist as such for several months of the year, and being only potentially represented by eggs, germs, or seeds, and sometimes by dormant pregnant females.

At the same time, while the cause of the seasons as a whole is the obliquity of the earth's axis, with the resulting inclination of either pole toward the sun alternately, we must not forget that the seasons and the climate in each particular country depend in part upon many minor contributory causes. It is not merely nearness to or distance from the equator that counts; we have to consider also relative distribution of land and water, elevation, prevalent winds, exposure, condensation, and many other elements of a complex problem. In Ecuador, for example, whose very name means the equator, the plain is always in scorching summer, the mountains are always in perpetual spring. The monsoons, again, produce in other countries some curious results: they depend themselves on the change of relative temperature in sea and land at different seasons; and they break upon the Himalayas with this odd and unexpected effect, that the snow line on the southern side of that vast range goes very far down, owing to the immense rainfall (or rather snowfall) and the consequent spread of snow fields and glaciers; while on the northern side it descends but a very little way, owing to the extreme desert drought and the great summer heat of the central Asiatic table-land. We have thus the apparent paradox that millions of Tibetans occupy towns and cultivate farms to the north at a height from three to four thousand feet above the snow line on the southern slope of the same mountains.

Looking at the matter broadly, then, and taking for granted the now generally accepted modern view that the great oceans and great continents have been relatively fixed (though liable to minor fluctuations and variations of outline) throughout all geological time, and that the earth's crust has not shifted from pole to equator or vice versa, we arrive at last at the following probable conclusions: There have always been seasons more or less marked, and these have been more or less organically answered by corresponding changes or cycles of change in plants and animals. Rain and drought have in many cases more to do with such changes than variations of temperature. The seasons, again, are less marked in the tropics than in temperate and circumpolar climates. Nevertheless, even near the equator, they exert and have always exerted certain organic influences-have resulted in annual cycles in the life of species. Even before the coming on of the Glacial epoch, the seasons were probably somewhat more marked in the temperate and polar regions than in the tropics, the longer day in summer and the greater directness of impact of the rays making the summer months always warmer. But for various reasons, among which we may presumably rank the absence in early ages of high land at the poles and of an accumulated polar ice cap, together with the existence of warm sea currents from the tropics to the poles, the winters of preglacial ages seem to have been relatively mild, perhaps (if we may judge by the types of plant life) milder than those of South Carolina and Georgia in our own period. No cold winds of importance seem then to have blown with blighting effect from glaciated or snow-clad districts. (Mars in our own time appears to enjoy winters somewhat of this character, though a little colder, with a temporary snow cap.) The seasons as we know them in temperate and arctic climates, however, seem to be largely the result of the glacial epoch, and its persistent legacy the arctic and antarctic ice caps. If we could once manage to get rid of those, it is possible that our planet might again enjoy in all its zones the mild and genial preglacial winters.

These are rough notes, I know; mere adumbrations of a probable truth: but adequately to develop the subject would require a very big volume. My object here is simply to suggest that in many inquiries, both into human and animal or vegetable life, we must never take the existence of seasons as we know them for granted, except in very recent times. The year, for organic beings, means essentially the seasons; and the seasons may mean and have meant many separate things, as time and place vary--heat and cold, food and scarcity, foliage and leaflessness, drought and wet; longer or shorter days, the midnight sun and the winter darkness; hibernation and wakefulness; the egg, the cocoon, the seed, the plant, the flower, the fruit; dormancy or vitality. According as human life started at the poles or the equator, for instance, it would view in the beginning many things differently. All I wish to point out now is merely this, that we must bear such possibilities ever in mind; and that we must never take it for granted in any problem, human or biological, that the seasons were always just what we know them, or that the year to any organic being meant anything more than the seasonal cycle then and there prevalent.--_Longman's Magazine._

* * * * *

In the excavations of the ancient cemetery of Antinoe, near Lyons, France, a "party dress" of the time of the Emperor Adrian, very fine silks, jewels, etc., have been discovered. One sarcophagus held the remains of a woman musician with a rose chemise, a cythara, pearls, castanets, etc.; in another was a child's costume with its little laced shoes, its vest ornamented with flowers _appliqués_, and its robe of gauffered crape. It appears that the women of sixteen hundred years ago dyed their hair with henna, and twisted ribbons round their heads. Nothing changes.

M. A. Thieullen, publishing the results of fifteen years' studies among the flint implements of the French beds, draws the conclusions that the elaborate palæolithic flint axe and hammer and the typical neolithic implements were luxuries used by the more distinguished members or for the more important purposes of the flint-implement-using community, while the ruder implements which are found in enormous numbers were the objects of general and daily use throughout all the flint-using ages, whether palæolithic or neolithic.

BRAIN WEIGHTS AND INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY.

BY JOSEPH SIMMS, M. D.

Having been for thirty years a lecturer on man and his character as evinced by his form, features, head, and gestures, and having made observations on the subject in all parts of North America, in continental Europe and Great Britain, and parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia, I should not be deemed presumptuous when I present a few facts regarding the relations of mind and the size and forms of heads and weights of brains. It has been observed by many persons versed in the branches relating to the subject that men with the largest brains are not those of most talent, power, or intellect; but many such have been only ordinary or inferior men, or even idiots; while some men of most powerful and comprehensive minds have had unusually small brains. Esquirol's assertion that no size or form of head or brain is incident to idiocy or to superior talent is borne out by my observations.

After long and careful research in the great libraries and museums of the world, I have collected a table of brain weights of eminent men, along with which are entered, in my original document, the occupation of the subject, age at the time of determination, and the source whence the item is derived. These can not be given within the limits of this article, and only the briefest and most generalized summary of the main features can be indicated. The largest weight of brain in the whole list is that of the Russian novelist Turgenieff, whose brain weighed, at the time of his death, at sixty-five years of age, 71 ounces.[32] It is a considerable step from him to the next in order, the English mechanician and author, Knight, whose brain weight at the age of fifty-eight was 64 ounces. Then follow the Scottish physician Abercrombie, 63 ounces; General B. F. Butler, 62 ounces; and the Scottish general Abercromby, 62 ounces. Another group of nine, including weights from 58.6 ounces to 54 ounces, includes Jeffrey, Scottish judge and author, Thackeray, Cuvier, George Combe, United States Senator Atherton, Spurzheim, and the Scottish physician Simpson. The next group, 53.6 to 50, is larger, including twenty-one names, among which are Daniel Webster, Agassiz, Napoleon I, the Scottish divine Chalmers, the mathematicians De Morgan and Gauss, the anthropologist Broca, and the generals Skoboleff and Lamarque. The last group, 49.9 to 40 ounces, contains twenty-five names, including those of the philosopher Huber, Grote, Babbage, the anthropologist Bertillon, Whewell,[33] Liebig, Gall, Gambetta, and Bishop, the mind reader. Only one remove from the foot of the list is Gambetta, a man of indisputably high genius and ability, with a brain weighing only 40.9 ounces.[34]

The table goes to illustrate a general rule which I discovered and published several years ago, that larger brains appertain to natives of colder climates. Dr. John Abercrombie, for instance, was born at Aberdeen, Scotland, on the German Sea, and farther north than any part of the United States. Sir Ralph Abercromby was born in the county of Clackmannan, Scotland, where it is far colder than any part of southern Europe. Lord Francis Jeffrey first saw light in Edinburgh. General Butler was born in Deerfield, New Hampshire. Ivan Turgenieff, with the heaviest brain of all, was a native of cold, inhospitable Russia. Dr. Franz Joseph Gall (brain weight 42.2 ounces)[35] was born in Würtemberg, in southern Germany, passed most of his life in Vienna and Paris, and, being a student, spent much of his time indoors. Gambetta was born at Cahors, France, of Italian parents. This climatological view of the size of brains is confirmed by a paper, "Crania," of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, which gives as the average size, in cubic inches, of the cranial cavities of various nationalities, taking the results of many measurements: Lapps, 102; Swedes, 100; Anglo-Saxons, 96; Finns, 95; Anglo-Americans, 94; Germans, 92; Celts, 88; Malays, 86; Chinese, 85; Tombs of Gizeh, 84; embalmed Semitic, 82; Egyptians, 80; Fellah, 79; Bengalese, 78.

A table of average brain weights of various nationalities, compiled from Topinard's and Manouvrier's works and other standard anthropological publications, illustrates the same tendency toward greater brain weights in colder countries. One of its results is to show that the colder air of the United States produces larger brains in the negroes than the warm air of Africa. The table further shows, in the comparisons of Hindus and African negroes, that the brains are smallest in the warmest countries, irrespective of race or nation; and that the largest average attained is in Scotland, where it is never extremely warm.

The measurement of the cranial cavity is a very uncertain gauge of the size of the brain, for the cerebro-spinal fluid may occupy a large share of the space. Weighing the brain is without doubt the only scientifically certain method of determining its size and mass.

Perhaps the most remarkable case in the table of great men's brains is that of Gambetta, who was behind none of his compeers in ability, and yet had the smallest brain of all. The first table of the "Average Weight of the Human Body and Mind," compiled from Dr. Boyd's researches among the sane, which was based on more than two thousand post-mortem examinations, gives 45.9 ounces as the average brain weight of boys from seven to fourteen years of age, and 40.2 ounces as that of boys and 40.1 ounces of girls from four to seven years of age. And this little brain of 40.9 ounces appertained to a man, "a lofty, commanding, mental figure, standing out in bold relief from the crowd of mediocrities which he dwarfs and shadows," the embodiment of the French Republic, who steered it through one of its most perilous crises, "the foremost Frenchman of his time," who "established his claim to be placed in the very front rank of European statesmen," and whose untimely death was spoken of as "nothing less than the sudden extinction of a powerful individual force, one of the most powerful, indeed, of such forces hitherto operating in Europe."

In illustration of the association of large brains with small minds, we have compiled from various sources of recognized authority a list of one hundred and twenty-five persons of ordinary or weak minds, idiots, imbeciles, and criminals, whose brains were generally larger than those of the distinguished men subjects of the preceding notes. Of these, Rustan, an ignorant and unknown workman, appears with a brain weighing 78.3 ounces;[36] the dwarfed Indian squaw who follows him, of 73.5 ounces;[37] an illiterate and weak-minded man had a brain of 71.3 ounces;[38] and a congenitally imbecile person cited by Dr. Ireland, with one of 70.5 ounces.[39] Another imbecile cited by Dr. Ireland had a brain of 63.2 ounces, and the brain of an idiot with a large head, eighteen years old, who had an idiotic sister, weighed 62.8 ounces. The brain of the idiot, No. 56 of the men in the table, 59.5 ounces, is exceeded in size by those of only five on the list of famous men, while eleven persons recorded as idiots, imbeciles, and children had brains heavier than his. An idiot boy of fourteen years, very malicious, who never spoke, and who nearly killed his sister with a pick, had a brain weight of 57.5 ounces. Thirty men out of three hundred and seventy-five examined in the West Riding Asylum gave brain weights of 55 ounces and upward, showing that such weights are not so rare as some have supposed. In another asylum in England one out of every dozen brains examined showed a weight of 55 ounces or more.

In _Nachrichten_, of Göttingen, 1860, pp. 70-71, Dr. Rudolph Wagner gave a table of thirty-two persons whose brains he examined, among whom were five distinguished men; but the largest brain weight recorded in it, 55.9 ounces, has opposite to it the legend, "Idiotic grown man."

To this list we might have added a large number of persons whose brains weighed less than 53 ounces. Yet the brains of Daniel Webster, Agassiz, Napoleon I, Lord Byron, Baron Dupuytren, General Skoboleff, and other famous men concerning whose large brains much has been said, weighed less than this; and we might have appended hundreds of brain weights of idiots, imbeciles, and other insignificant persons, from 53 ounces down to 49 ounces--probably about the average weight in central Europe. In support of our contention is, further, an observation by Dr. Rudolph Wagner in _Nachrichten_, February 29, 1860, pp. 71, 72, that "very intelligent men certainly do not differ strikingly in brain weight from less gifted men."

Dr. Clendenning presents in the Croonian Lectures the following entries of brain weights of male subjects of different ages, the tendency of which is to show that the male encephalon loses, after it is grown, more than an ounce every ten years:

15 to 30 years 50.75 ounces. 30 to 50 " 49.66 " 50 to 70 " 47.1 " 70 to 100 " 41.5 "

A number of other eminent anatomists have given similar evidence of decrease in brain weight as intellectual power increases.

The "Professor at the Breakfast Table," the late Dr. O. W. Holmes, a learned man and experienced physician and professor of anatomy in Harvard University for thirty-five years, says: "The walls of the head are double, with a great chamber of air between them, over the smallest and most crowded organs. Can you tell me how much money there is in a safe, which also has thick walls, by kneading the knobs with your fingers? So, when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of individuality, size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt over the outside of my strong box, and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-dollar bill under this or that rivet. Perhaps there is, only he doesn't know anything about it. We will add that, even if he knows the inward dimensions of the strong box, he could not thence determine the amount of cash deposited in it."

The internal size of Spurzheim's skull was in cubic inches exactly the same as that of the skull of Joachim, an imbecile six feet nine inches in height, with a brain weight of 61.2 ounces, whereas Spurzheim's brain weighed only 55 ounces.

Whoever has examined heads in the dissecting room of a medical college knows that, except in rare cases of disease, the brain does not fit the skull, but is surrounded by three membranes and a watery fluid; and this liquid, it has been ascertained, is generally sufficient to admit of its performing certain movements.