Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/54

 40 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

we find a greater tendency to variation in man and a greater tendency to atavism in woman.

I the secondary sexual characters of man are highly variable, even within the limits of the same race ; and they differ much in the several races. Numerous measurements carefully made of the stature, the circum- ference of the neck and chest, the length ot the backbone and of the arms, in various races .... nearly all show that the males differ much more from one another than do the females. This fact indicates that, as far as these characters are concerned, it is the male which has been chiefly modified, since the several races diverged from their common stock. 1

Morphologically the development of man is more accentu- ated in almost every respect than that of woman. Anthro- pologists, indeed, regard woman as intermediate in development between the child and the man.

The outlines of the adult female cranium are intermediate between those of the child and the adult man ; they are softer, more graceful and delicate, and the apophyses and ridges for the attachment of muscles are less pro- nounced the forehead is .... more perpendicular, to such a degree

that in a group of skulls those of the two sexes have been mistaken for differ- ent types; the superciliary ridges and the gabella are far less developed, often not at all ; the crown is higher and more horizontal ; the brain weight and cranial capacity are less ; the mastoid apophyses, the inion, the styloid apoph- yses, and the condyles of the occipital are of less volume, the zygomatic and alveolar arches are more regular. 2

Wagner decided that the brain of woman taken as a whole is uniformly in a more or less embryonic condition. Huschke says that woman is always a growing child and that her brain departs from the infantile type no more than the other portions of her body. 3 Weisbach 4 pointed out that the limits of varia- tion in the skull of man are greater than in that of woman. Genius in general is correlated with an excessive development in brain growth, stopping dangerously near the line of hyper- trophy and insanity, while microcephaly is a variation in the opposite direction in which idiocy results from arrested develop-

1 DARWIN, he. cit., chap. 19.

a P. TOPINARD, Elements d 1 Anthropologie generate, p. 253.

3 DELAUNAY, he. cit.

4 WEISBACH, "Der deutsche Weiberschadel," Archiv fur Anthropoiogie, Vol. Ill, p. 66.