Observations on the size of the brain in various races and families of man / by Samuel George Morton, M.D.

  • Samuel George Morton
Date:
[between 1850 and 1859?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the size of the brain in various races and families of man / by Samuel George Morton, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    OBSERVATIONS ON THE SIZE OF THE BRAIN IN VARIOUS RACES AND FAMILIES OF MAN. By Samuel George Morton, M. D. [From the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, October, 1849.] I have great pleasure in submitting to the Academy the results of the internal measurements of six hundred and twenty-three human crania, made with a view to ascertain the relative size of the brain in various races and families of Man. These measurements have been made by the process invented by my friend Mr. J. S. Phillips, and described in my Crania Americana, p, 253, merely sub- stituting leaden shot, one-eighth of an inch in diameter, in place of the white mustard-seed originally used. I thus obtain the absolute capacity of the cranium, or bulk of the brain, in cubic inches ; and the results are annexed in all those in- stances in which I have had leisure to put this revised mode of measurement in practice. I have restricted it, at least for the purpose of my inferential conclu- sions, to the crania of persons of sixteen years of age and upwards, at which period the brain is believed to possess the adult size. Under this age, the capacity-measurement has only been resorted to for the purpose of collateral comparison ; nor can [ avoid expressing my satisfaction at the singular accuracy of this method, since a skull of an hundred cubic inches, if measured any number of times with reasonable care, will not vary a single cubic inch. All these measurements have been made with my own hands. I at one time employed a person to assist me ; but having detected some errors in his measure- ments, I have been at the pains to revise all that part of the series that had not been previously measured by myself. I can now, therefore, vouch for the accu- racy of these multitudinous data, which I cannot but regard as a novel and im- portant contribution to Ethnological science. I am now engaged in a memoir which will embrace in detail the conclusions that result from these data; and meanwhile I submit the following tabular view of the prominent facts.