Whewell,[1] 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.[2]
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)[3] 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.
