Full value has been assigned at all periods to the well-developed forehead. It is characteristic of man. The physiognomist and the phrenologist have each given significance to it in their respective systems; and it has received no less prominent recognition from the poets. A fully developed forehead is assumed as distinctive of the male skull. But Juliet, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when depreciating her rival, exclaims, “Ay, but her forehead’s low”; and the jealous Queen of Egypt, in Antony and Cleopatra, is told of Octavia that “her forehead is as low as she would wish it.” “The fair large front” of Milton’s perfect man is the external index of an ample cerebrum: the organ to which the seat of consciousness, intelligence, and will is assigned. It is therefore consistent with this that a low, retreating forehead is popularly assumed to be the characteristic index of the savage, and of the unintellectual among civilised races. But the cerebral characteristics of both ancient and modern civilised races have still to be studied in detail; and the influence of race and sex on the form of the head and the mass and weight of the brain, involves some curious questions in relation to the oldest illustrations of the physical characteristics of man, and to the effect of civilisation on the relative development of the sexes.

Early observations led Dr. Pruner-Bey and other ethnologists of France to recognise in certain ancient Gaulish skulls of a brachycephalic type the evidences of a primitive race, assumed to represent the inhabitants of France and of Central Europe during its Reindeer period, and which appeared to be assigned with reasonable probability to a Mongol origin. But in the Cro-Magnon cavern, and in other caves more recently explored, the remains of a race of men have been brought to light markedly dolichocephalic, and no less striking in cranial capacity. Dr. Broca speaks of these ancient cave-dwellers of the valley of the Vézère as characterised by “sure signs of a powerful cerebral organisation. The skulls are large. Their diameters, their curves, their capacity, attain, and even surpass, our medium skulls of the present day. The forehead is wide, by no means receding, but describing a fine curve. The amplitude of the frontal tuberosities denotes a large development of the anterior cerebral lobes, which are the seat of the most noble intellectual faculties.”

This primitive race of hunters, marked by such exceptional characteristics, belonged to the remote Reindeer period of Western Europe, and was contemporary with the mammoth, the tichorine rhinoceros, and the fossil horse, as well as with the cave-lion, the cave-bear, and other long-extinct carnivora of Europe. The remarkable evidence of their intellectual capacity has already been reviewed, in considering the manifestations of the artistic faculty among primitive races. Their weapons and implements, including carved maces or official batons, as they are assumed to be, contribute additional evidence of skill and latent capacity among a primitive race of hunters and cave-dwellers. Dr. Broca, after a consideration of the merits of their ingenious arts, says: “They had advanced to the very threshold of civilisation”; and Dr. Pruner-Bey thus comments on their characteristics: “If we consider that its three individuals had a cranial capacity much superior to the average at the present day; that one of them was a female, and that female crania are generally below the average of male crania in size; and that nevertheless the cranial capacity of the Cro-Magnon woman surpasses the average capacity of male skulls of to-day, we are led to regard the great size of the brain as one of the more remarkable characters of the Cro-Magnon race. This cerebral volume seems to me even to exceed that with which at the present day a stature equal to that of our cave-folks would be associated; whilst the skulls from the Belgium caves are small, not only absolutely, but even relatively in the rather small stature of the inhabitants of those caves.”

The Canstadt head is undoubtedly an unintellectual type suggestive of an inferior, though not necessarily an older savage race; for the evidence of climate, contemporary fauna, and other indices of the environments of the Cro-Magnon cave-dwellers, all point to an early Post-Glacial era. Dr. Isaac Taylor, in his Origin of the Aryans, assuming the priority of the Canstadt man, speaks of him as “this primitive savage, the earliest inhabitant of Europe.” The forehead in this type is low and receding, and the cerebral capacity generally correspondingly inferior. The relative superposition in some discoveries of ancient human remains, as in the alluvium and gravels of a former bed of the Seine, at Grenelle, lends confirmation to the idea that in this poorly-developed cranial type we recover the physical characteristics of the earliest type of the European savage thus far brought to light. But no disclosure of regular sepulture, or of implements or carvings assignable to him, have hitherto furnished the means of determining his condition or mode of life.

The disclosures of the rock-shelters in the valley of the Vézère are, on the contrary, replete with interest, from the evidence they furnish of a race of savage hunters, in whom ingenious skill and great artistic aptitude gave evidence of latent intellectual capacity of a high order. The remarkable size of crania accompanying those examples of primitive art seemingly pertaining to the Troglodytes of the Mammoth and Reindeer periods of Central Europe, is the more significant from its bearing on the evidence of progressive cerebral development adduced by Dr. Broca from skulls recovered from ancient and modern cemeteries of Paris. It appears, indeed, to conflict with any theory of a progressive development from the Troglodyte of the Post-Glacial age to the civilised Frenchman of modern times. Professor Boyd Dawkins has accordingly been at some pains in his Cave Hunting to show that the conclusions formed by previous observers as to the epoch of their burial are not supported by the facts of the case; and he sums up his review of the whole evidence by expressing a conviction that he “should feel inclined to assign the interments to the Neolithic age, in which cave-burial was so common. The facts,” he adds, “do not warrant the human skeletons being taken as proving the physique of the palæolithic hunters of the Dordogne, or as a basis for an inquiry into the ethnology of the palæolithic races. Professor Boyd Dawkins also pronounces the same doubts in reference to the equally characteristic male skeleton found in a cave at Mentone, and to others obtained in the Lombrive and other caves. It is not to be overlooked that the possibility of the intrusion of human remains into earlier strata constitutes an important element suggesting caution in reasoning from such evidence. For the remains of man differ from those of other animals found in such series of deposits as mark a succession of periods, in so far as they pertain to the only animal habitually given to the practice of interment. Human skeletons found under such circumstances may have been artificially intruded long subsequent to the accumulation of the breccia in which they lay. Happily, however, any doubts as to the contemporaneity of the human remains with the other cave relics has been removed by the discovery of skeletons, similar in type, in other caverns in the same valley—and especially in that of Laugerie Basse,—in positions which seem to leave no room for questioning their being of the same age as the works of art found along with them.

Other examples of the ancient man of Europe show him in like manner endowed with a cerebral development in advance of the rudest races of modern times. The skull found by Dr. Schmerling in the Engis cave, near Liège, along with remains of six or seven human skeletons, was embedded in the same matrix with bones of the fossil elephant, rhinoceros, hyæna, and other extinct quadrupeds. It is a fairly proportioned, well-developed dolichocephalic skull; and, like others of the ancient human skulls of different types thus far found, has signally disappointed the expectations of those who count upon invariably finding a lower type the older the formation in which it occurs. “Assuredly,” says Professor Huxley, “there is no mark of degradation about any part of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brain of a savage.” Even the famous Neanderthal skull, of uncertain geological antiquity, but pronounced to be “the most brutal of all human skulls,” acquires its exceptional character, as already noted, chiefly from the abnormal development of the superciliary region.

It is a universally accepted fact that the size of the male head and the weight of the brain are greater than those of the female. The average weight of the male brain is found to exceed that of the female by about 10 per cent; or, as it is stated by Professor Welcker, the brain-weight of man is to that of woman as 100 to 90. But the difference of stature between the two sexes has to be taken into account. The average, based on various series of observations to determine the mean stature for man and for woman, shows the latter to be about 8 per cent less than the former; or, as Dr. Thurnam has stated it more precisely:

RATIO OF STATURE AND BRAIN-WEIGHT IN THE TWO SEXES

Male.Female.
Stature10092.0
Weight of brain10090.3