John Grattan (1800-1871), the Belfast apothecary, has never received the recognition that was his due. Having undertaken to describe the numerous ancient Irish skulls collected by his friend Edmund Getty, he soon became impressed by the absence of
that uniformity of method and that numerical precision without which no scientific investigation requiring the co-operation of numerous observers can be successfully prosecuted. The mode of procedure hitherto adopted furnishes to the mind nothing but vague generalities ... until we can record with something approaching towards accuracy the proportional development of the great subdivisions of the brain, as indicated by its bony covering, and by our figures convey to the mind determinate ideas of the relation they bear towards each other, we shall not be in a position to do justice to our materials.... No single cranium can per se be taken to represent the true average characteristics of the variety from which it may be derived. It is only from a large deduction that the ethnologist can venture to pronounce with confidence upon the normal type of any race.[[21]]
[21]. J. Grattan, Ulster Journal of Arch., 1858.
Grattan devised a series of radial measurements from the meatus auditorius, and constructed an ingenious craniometer. As Professor J. Symington points out, “Grattan’s work was almost cotemporaneous with that of Anders Retzius, and nearly all of it was done before the German and French Schools had elaborated their schemes of skull measurements.”[[22]] He adopted the most useful of the measurements then existing, and added new ones of his own devising.
[22]. Proc. Belfast Nat. Hist. and Phil. Soc., 1903-4; and Journ. Anat. and Phys.
The distinguished American physician and physiologist Dr. J. Aitken Meigs laid down the principles that “Cranial measurements to be of practical use should be both absolute and relative. Absolute measurements are necessary to demonstrate those anatomical differences between the crania of different races which assume a great zoological significance in proportion to their constancy. By relative measurements of the head we obtain an approximate idea of the peculiar physiological character of the enclosed brain ... the craniographer, in fact, becomes the cranioscopist” (1861, p. 857). In this paper Meigs gives craniometrical directions, some of which were designed to give measurements for portions of the brain.
Broca.
In France the greatest names are those of Broca, Topinard, and de Quatrefages. Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880) was first destined for the army, but when the death of his sister left him the only child he was unwilling to leave his parents, and resolved to study medicine and share the work of his father, an eminent physician. He soon distinguished himself, especially in surgery, not only in practical work, but also in his writings. With regard to the latter, Dr. Pozzi, in a memoir, says of him: “There is hardly one of the subjects in which he did not at the first stroke make a discovery, great or small; there is not one on which he has not left the mark of his originality.”[[23]]
[23]. J.A.I., x., 1881, p. 243.
