Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/39

Rh of my life that I did not save those peculiar structures; they were over twenty times as thick as the ordinary toe-nail, and evidently had not been trimmed for years. That same winter I dissected a rather light-colored negress who had double breasts, two upon each side, one above the other. All four were fully developed and, in life, functional. So far as my knowledge carries me, the development of a tail, that is, a free, movable caudal appendage, with rudimentary vertebras in it, occurs quite as infrequently in the white race as it does in the negro. It is very rare in either. In the skull of the negro the cranial capacity and the brain itself is much under-sized. On the average, the former will hold thirty-five fluid ounces, as against forty-five for the Caucasian skull. In the negro the cranial bones are dense and unusually thick, converting his head into a veritable battering-ram. Moreover the cranial sutures unite firmly very early in life. This checks the development of the brain long before that takes place in other races, and this fact accounts to some extent for the more or less sudden stunting of the Ethiopian intellect shortly after arriving at puberty. Filippo Manetta has pointed out that "the negro children [on the plantations in the South] were sharp, intelligent, and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seems to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence. We must necessarily suppose that the development of the Negro and White proceeds on different lines, while with the latter the volume of the brain grows with the expansion of the brain-pan, in the former the growth of the brain is on the contrary