Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/526

508 they are, owing to their persecutions, the shortest of all European folk, their relative superiority in brain comes out even more strikingly.

The conclusion I have thus drawn from anthropological data receives remarkable confirmation from the results of an inquiry I made on the Comparative Distribution of Jewish Ability, and contributed to the Anthropological Institute in 1886. Applying the methods of Galton, I compared the celebrities produced by the Jewish race during the last hundred years with those of Englishmen and Scotchmen, and came to the conclusion that the race, as a whole, took rank between Scotchmen and Englishmen in intellectual capacity, while if the comparison had been confined to western Jews, who alone have had an opportunity of displaying their talents, they would have come out superior to both. From the anthropological side we should expect that the brachycephalism of Jews would show itself in superior mental capacity, and this is confirmed by the number of distinguished persons of Jewish blood recorded in the European dictionaries of biography.

The anthropological and sociological importance of this result, if confirmed by further inquiry, seems to me of very great significance for the science of anthropology, and for this reason I have insisted so much upon it. Skull capacity and cephalic index are not so much indications of race as of intellect. If it is found that, as a rule, each race, and even each people, tends to have a uniform cephalic index, that would merely imply that the sociological conditions of the said race or people were tolerably uniform as regards intellectual development. Australians, who have had no opportunity of pitting their wits against any other competing race, and have depended for their existence on the fleetness of their legs and the capacity of their stomachs to carry food from one orgy to another, have used their brains less than all other human races, and have the narrowest skulls of all. Teutons, who have had the largest sphere for intellectual rivalry with their neighbors, have the broadest skulls of all except the Jews, who have, so to speak, lived by their wits the last two thousand years. The evidence produced by Professor Kipley of long-headed Jews among the lower developed communities only shows that where the brain is not much exercised the skull is not broadened.

So far, then, from history and anthropology giving contrary verdicts with regard to the racial purity of the Jews, the above considerations would seem to show that they rather confirm one another's interpretation of the facts. If brain capacity and skull index follow the intellectual struggle for existence, we should not be surprised to find the Jews mostly broad-headed. If there had