Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/599

Rh considerable as compared with the height from forehead to chin. Anthropologists make use of this relation to measure the so-called facial index; but a lack of uniformity in the mode of taking measurements has so far prevented extended observations fit for exact comparison. It is sufficient for our purposes to adopt the rule, long head, oval face; short head and round face. Our six types on the next page, arranged in an ascending series of cephalic indices from 65 to 94, make clearly manifest this relation between the head and face. In proportion as the heads become broader back of the temples, the face appears relatively shorter. The correspondence is not exact, as, for example, in the case of the brachycephalic type from Piedmont in Italy, where the face is rather long for the breadth of the head. This is probably a case of individual variation, perhaps due to racial intermixture. Only a few examples of widespread disharmonism, as it is called, between head and face are known. The Greenland Eskimos resemble the Lapp shown in our portrait in squareness of face, notwithstanding the fact, illustrated in the world map on page 582, that they are almost the longest-headed race known. In Europe, where disharmonism is very infrequent among the living populations, its prevalence in the prehistoric Cro-Magnon race, will afford us a means of identification of this type wherever it persists to-day. At times disharmonism arises in mixed types the product of a cross between a broad and a long headed race, wherein the one element contributes the head form while the other persists rather in the facial proportions. Such combinations are apt to occur among the Swiss, lying as they do at the ethnic crossroads of the continent.

An important point to be noted in this connection is that this shape of the head seems to bear no direct relation to intellectual power or intelligence. Posterior development of the cranium does not imply a corresponding backwardness in culture. The broad-headed races of the earth may not as a whole be quite as deficient in civilization as some of the long heads, notably the Australians and Melanesians. On the other hand, the Chinese are conspicuously long-headed, surrounded by the barbarian brachycephalic Mongol hordes; and the Eskimos in many respects surpass the Indians in culture. Dozens of similar contrasts might be given. Europe offers the best refutation of the statement that the proportions of the head mean anything intellectually. The English, as our map of Europe will show, are distinctly long-headed. Measurements on the students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are fairly typical for the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Out of a total of 486 men, four were characterized at one extreme by an index below 70; the upper limit was marked by four men with an index of 87. The series of heads culminated at an index of 77,