The shape would seem to be more significant than the weight of the brain. Of all the elements of gross cerebral anatomy it appears to be that most indicative of mental power.
This is a recent discovery of craniologists, the entire meaning of which has not yet been worked out. It is due to the researches of Ammon and Lapouge within the last decade, and to the anthropologist promises solutions of various obscure problems in the cultural growth of the species.
These observers have ascertained, by many thousand measurements on the living and the dead, that those persons who, as a class, are best adapted to the high and continued strain of modern city and competitive life, have skulls in that shape termed “subdolichocephalic,” which means that their brains have a prevailing and fixed spatial relation of their parts, a relation, no doubt, which is the most favourable to the general and prolonged activity of those nerve cells which we know are the seat of psychical function.
Such persons in youth stand at the head in the school, they take the prizes in examinations, they carry off the honours in intellectual contests, they are leaders in the learned professions, they are the self-created “upper class,” and, what is equally noteworthy, in the unhealthy atmosphere of great cities they outlive their associates with other shapes of brain.
But these observers also note that while these somewhat long-skulled persons have such intellectual and even physical advantages in the struggle for existence, they are deficient in others, which, under some circumstances, are even more necessary to success.
The same extended series of measurements and comparisons show that those whose brains are rounder in form—more brachycephalic—prove generally superior in technical skill, in industry, and in perseverance. They are less adventurous, they lack imagination and the stimulus of the ideal, they are narrow and formalists; but they shine in the bourgeois virtues of capacity for steady work, of devotion to hearth and home, in respect for settled government, stable laws, and ancestral institutions.
This favourable brain shape is, in Europe, often correlated with the blonde type, light hair, and grey or blue eyes; but whether this is anything more than a local peculiarity remains in doubt.
Ammon has pointed out, however, that these traits, where they have been united in history, have marked a daring, energetic, progressive stock, one fertile in bold explorers, conquerors, and thinkers. Such was the type of the ancient Aryans, who became the ruling race wherever they carried their victorious standard, “not through numbers, longevity, or fertility, but through the consequences of ‘natural selection.’” Professor Lapouge has further shown that in southern France, where the local aristocracy rose from the same stock as the peasantry by superior personal ability, a notable difference is observable between the skull-shapes of the two classes, the crania of the “gentlemen” being considerably longer in proportion to width than those of the peasantry.
They are well suited for village life and agricultural occupations; but, subjected to the stress and strain of great cities, they die out in the third generation.[[3]]
[3]. These deductions were based on many thousand observations in France, Switzerland, and Germany, and are undoubtedly true for the places and periods in which they were conducted; but it has not been shown that they are generally applicable in other areas. Some observers (Livi, Lombroso) have not accepted them for Italy. The opposition they have met in France from Fouillée and others is merely sentimental.