Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/305

Rh came to Rome and saw the Belvedere Apollo, exclaimed, "It is a young Mohawk warrior!" Much the same has been said of the proportions of Zooloo athletes. Yet, if fairly-chosen photographs of Caffres be compared with a classic model, such as the Apollo, it will be noticed that the trunk of the African has a somewhat wall-sided straightness, wanting in the inward slope which gives fineness to the waist, and in the expansion below which gives breadth across the hips, these being two of the most noticeable points in the classic model which our painters recognize as an ideal of manly beauty.

In comparing races, one of the first questions that occurs is, whether people, who differ so much intellectually as savage tribes and civilized nations, show any corresponding difference in their brain. There is, in fact, a considerable difference. The most usual way of ascertaining the quantity of brain is to measure the capacity of the brain-case by filling skulls with shot or seed. Professor Flower gives as a mean estimate of the contents of skulls in cubic inches—Australian, seventy-nine; African, eighty-five; European, ninety-one. Eminent anatomists also think that the brain of the European is somewhat more complex in its convolutions than the brain of a negro or Hottentot. Thus, though these observations are far from perfect, they show a connection between a more full and intricate system of brain-cells and fibers, and a higher intellectual power, in the races which have risen in the scale of civilization.

The form of the skull itself has been to the anatomist one of the best means of distinguishing races. It is often possible to tell by inspection of a skull what race it belongs to. In comparing skulls, some of the most easily noticeable distinctions are the following:

When looked at from the vertical or top view, the proportion of breadth to length is seen as in Fig. 2. Taking the diameter from back



to front as 100, the cross diameter gives the so-called index of breadth, which is here about 70 in the negro (a), 80 in the European (b), and 85 in the Samoyed (c). Such skulls are classed respectively as dolichocephalic, or "long-headed"; mesocephalic, or "middle-headed"; and brachycephalic, or "short-headed." A model skull of a flexible