astronomical year--the year of the sun's position--at least till a
relatively late stage in culture, if he had not first noticed the
organic year--the regular recurrence of plant and animal seasons. So
many yams--that is to say, so many yam harvests--in other words, so
many years, is a common savage way of reckoning times and ages. But
they call it "yams," not summers or winters. And when I say yams, I
give that merely as a single instance, for elsewhere the "seedtime
and harvest" are reckoned indifferently in maize or millet, rice
or barley, according to the agriculture of the particular people.
Even hunting races know that at certain times of year certain foods
abound; and this is true of equatorial savages and equatorial plants
or animals, as well as of others.
Moons are more obvious measures of time than suns, in the tropics at
least--probably everywhere; for the waxing and waning of the moon
mean much to people who live largely out of doors; and the month is,
perhaps, the earliest fixed mode of reckoning time beyond a day or
two. Most savages count time mainly by so many moons. But they must
also have noticed early that after a certain number of moons (usually
about thirteen), certain fruits or seeds were ripe again; especially
must they have noticed it when this recurrence coincided with the
return of the rainy season, or of some other annual meteorological
phenomenon, like the bursting of the monsoon or the Nile inundation.
Thus, even in the tropics, and before the coming on of the Glacial
epoch, men or the ancestors of men (one can not draw precise lines
here) must probably have observed a certain rough relation between
the months and the vegetative cycles; after so many moons, about say
thirteen, the yam, or the mangoes, or the grains are ripe again.
These organic years, I take it, must have been noticed before the
astronomical ones. For it is now beginning to be more and more
believed that man is of preglacial origin; and even if something
worth calling a man were not, then at least man's pre-human
ancestors go back far into the Tertiary period. Only later would men
begin to note that some thirteen moons, and the recurrence of a food
stuff, concurred with a particular solar season.
Indeed, if one comes to think of it, how much even now do any of us,
save the most scientific, mean by the year, beyond the visible change
of summer and winter? What we are thinking of is the leafless trees,
the ice and snow, the green grass in spring, the flowers and warm
days in summer, not the abstract astronomical fact of the earth's
revolution round the sun, or the due succession of the signs of the
zodiac. It is that visible organic year that must have counted most
with man from the first; though no doubt its meaning and reality are
much more vividly present since the coming on of the Glacial epoch,
and the more so in proportion as we live nearer to the north or
south pole; while at the equator the year is to the last a much more
inconspicuous period--a largely artificial mode of reckoning.
Still, from the very first, there was one element of diversity in
the year which must have struck all men, in the temperate and frigid
zones at least, perhaps even in a certain way in the tropics. I mean,
the varying length of the day, always perceptible in the frigid and
temperate zones; for as soon as men in these regions began to think
and to observe at all, they must have noticed that the days increased
in their summer and lessened in their winter; and they must have
learned to correlate this waxing and waning of the day with the
appearance or abundance of certain fruits, seeds, birds, fishes,
game, roots and other food stuffs. It is at least certain that all
the world over men do now celebrate the solstices and the equinoxes
as special feasts; and the close similarity in most such celebrations
leads one to suspect that the custom has been handed down from the
very remote time when the human family was still a single continuous
body.
In the tropics, it is true, the days vary so little that this
difference in itself is not likely to have struck primæval man. But
there, another point would come in--the annual movement of the sun
overhead from south to north and _vice versa_; and though this would
be less directly important to human life than in temperate regions,
it would still be indirectly important. It would bring the rain with
it. In Europe, of course, and in temperate America, we can see at
once that the return of the sun northward must always have meant
spring, the increase of food stuffs, the promise of corn or maize,
the suggestion of harvest; and we can therefore understand why the
midwinter feast, when the sun after his long journey south begins
to move visibly north again, should have been both in pagan and
Christian times the great festival of rejoicing for the men of the
north temperate region. Day by day they saw the sun recede and the
cold deepen; at last, one evening, he sets a little nearer, and they
know that he has not deserted them forever. Similarly, the promise
made at Yule begins to be realized at that other great feast of
the spring equinox, which we still call in England by its ancient
heathen title of Easter; the day by that time has got the better of
the night, and "the sun dances on Easter Sunday" in commemoration
of his completed victory over the combined powers of winter and
darkness. In the tropics, on the other hand, the connection is less
clear; but even here the shifting of the sun's apparent place is
closely correlated with the shifting of the rain zone; and therefore
it would not be long (after man was man) before tropical savages
began to perceive a constant relation between the movements of the
sun to north or south, and the occurrence of the fertilizing rainy
season. We must remember that savages, with their improvident habits,
are much more dependent upon rain than we are, and that magical
ceremonies for breaking up a drought are among their commonest and
most universally diffused superstitions.
On the whole, then, before the coming on of the Glacial epoch, we may
be pretty sure that plants and animals on the one hand had learned
organically and automatically to recognize the existence of the year
and to adapt themselves to it; and that men or the progenitors of
men on the other hand had also learned to correlate the recurrent
seasons of food supply with the movements of the sun, though nothing
equivalent to winter and summer as we know them to-day existed as
yet on any part of our planet. I say advisedly "on any part of our
planet," because even near the pole itself remains of a subtropical
vegetation in Tertiary times have been amply indicated. Nevertheless,
in all parts of the world then, as in the tropics now, we may gather
that plants and animals ran through annual cycles--that the year, as
I have put it, was organically recognized. Trees had their time to
sprout, to bud, to flower, to fruit, to seed, to shed their leaves
(in the evergreen way); birds had their time to nest and hatch out
their young; insects had their fixed periods for laying, for larval
life, for assuming the chrysalis form, for becoming winged beetles or
bees or butterflies. In one word, the year is a terrestrial reality,
not merely an astronomical fact, in the tropics now; it was a
terrestrial reality over the whole planet in the Tertiary period. But
it was hardly more marked, apparently, into distinct seasons than it
is marked to-day in the equatorial region. Rainfall and drought must
have had more to do in determining the annual cycles than winter and
summer.
From all this it must result that the conception of the year as an
epoch at all (save for advanced astronomy) is almost or entirely
due to that tilt of the earth's axis which causes the seasons--dry
or wet, cold or hot. Without the seasons, in one form or other, we
might have been ages longer in discovering the fact that the earth
moved round the sun, and that some three hundred and sixty-five days
(I omit those important fractions) were needed for its revolution.
Certainly, without the seasons, at least to the extent that they
occur in the tropics, plant and animal life could hardly have assumed
its fixed annual cycles, nor could early men have caught at the idea
of the year at all as a period of time, a unit of measurement.
Before the Glacial epoch, in particular, the discovery of the year,
organically or consciously, must have been much more difficult than
it is now in high latitudes. It must have been almost as difficult
in what are now the temperate zones as it is to-day in the tropics.
Far north or south, of course, the length of the day would tell;
and within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles the long night would
form an unmistakable feature. But if the plane of the equator had
always found itself vertical to the sun, there could have been no
recognition of the year at all, either organic or conscious. In
other words, from the point of view of organic life, the year does
not mean the revolution of the earth round the sun: it means the
apparent northward and southward movement of the sun on either side
of the equator; it means the seasons, whether recognized as winter
and summer, or as dry and wet periods. That is really the year as man
knows it, as plants and animals have always known it.
With the coming on of the great cold spell, however, the importance
of the seasons in the temperate and frigid zones, perhaps also
even in the tropics, became much more marked. I will not go here
into the suggested reasons for that vast revolution, perhaps the
greatest our planet has ever suffered. Most physicists now accept
more or less the theory put forward with great ingenuity by Mr.
Croll, which sets it down to a period of extreme eccentricity in the
earth's orbit; but some weight must also be allowed, as Mr. Alfred
Russel Wallace has clearly shown, to the local arrangement of land
and water on the globe at the time of its origin, as well as to the
occurrence of mountain ranges just then at the poles, and to other
purely terrestrial causes. Never before, in all probability, had the
poles been occupied by great glacier-clad mountains. It seems most
likely, indeed, that we are now practically at the end of the Glacial
epoch, and that if only we could once get rid of the polar ice caps,
which keep a stock of chilliness always laid on (I speak the quite
comprehensible language of everyday life), we might recur forthwith
to the warm and almost imperceptible winters of the preglacial
period. But, as things stand, the stock of ice at the poles never
gets melted away in the existing northern or southern summer; fresh
ice accumulates on top of the old mass with each winter; prevailing
winds, blowing over this ice, chill regions lying much farther
toward the tropics; icebergs detach themselves and float off, thus
lowering the temperature of the sea in the middle zones; arctic or
antarctic currents spread round the coasts and absorb the solar
heat in enormous quantities. We have only to remember the trenchant
difference in England between a parching cold east wind and a mild
sou'wester to realize what an immense part these polar ice caps and
frozen highlands play in the production of our existing winter. Alps,
Pyrenees, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains, further assist in the same
direction.
On the other hand, currents in the sea may cut either way; the Gulf
Stream makes England warm, while the arctic current makes Labrador,
much farther south, practically uninhabitable.
Ever since the Glacial epoch, therefore, it has been quite easy
for man in the temperate and frigid zones to recognize the year as
a natural reality. The annual cycles of heat and cold are far too
marked to be overlooked by anybody. Organically, they made themselves
felt at once by extraordinary changes induced in the fauna and flora.
Before the steady advance of the annual cold wave, vegetation had
perforce to alter its ways. The large-leaved evergreens went out
altogether in frigid and high temperate regions; deciduous trees,
or needle-leaved types like the pines and firs, took the place of
the luxuriant Miocene foliage in Europe and North America. Every
autumn the larger number of trees and shrubs learned to shed their
leaves all together; every spring they came out anew in fresh green
and in masses of blossom. Similarly with animals. Birds learned to
migrate, or to accommodate themselves to the winter; insects learned
to hibernate in the egg or the cocoon; pigs fattened themselves on
mast against the frozen time; moles slept over winter; squirrels
hoarded nuts for a store to bridge over heavy frosts; frogs retired
to the warmer mud in the depths of ponds; adders coiled themselves in
holes and dozed away the cold season. Innumerable adaptations sprang
up at once, those species or individuals which failed to meet the
new conditions perishing in the struggle. In proportion as we recede
from the tropics, the more marked do the annual cycles of life thus
induced become, many species practically ceasing to exist as such for
several months of the year, and being only potentially represented by
eggs, germs, or seeds, and sometimes by dormant pregnant females.
At the same time, while the cause of the seasons as a whole is the
obliquity of the earth's axis, with the resulting inclination of
either pole toward the sun alternately, we must not forget that the
seasons and the climate in each particular country depend in part
upon many minor contributory causes. It is not merely nearness to
or distance from the equator that counts; we have to consider also
relative distribution of land and water, elevation, prevalent winds,
exposure, condensation, and many other elements of a complex problem.
In Ecuador, for example, whose very name means the equator, the plain
is always in scorching summer, the mountains are always in perpetual
spring. The monsoons, again, produce in other countries some curious
results: they depend themselves on the change of relative temperature
in sea and land at different seasons; and they break upon the
Himalayas with this odd and unexpected effect, that the snow line on
the southern side of that vast range goes very far down, owing to
the immense rainfall (or rather snowfall) and the consequent spread
of snow fields and glaciers; while on the northern side it descends
but a very little way, owing to the extreme desert drought and the
great summer heat of the central Asiatic table-land. We have thus the
apparent paradox that millions of Tibetans occupy towns and cultivate
farms to the north at a height from three to four thousand feet above
the snow line on the southern slope of the same mountains.
Looking at the matter broadly, then, and taking for granted the
now generally accepted modern view that the great oceans and great
continents have been relatively fixed (though liable to minor
fluctuations and variations of outline) throughout all geological
time, and that the earth's crust has not shifted from pole to
equator or vice versa, we arrive at last at the following probable
conclusions: There have always been seasons more or less marked, and
these have been more or less organically answered by corresponding
changes or cycles of change in plants and animals. Rain and drought
have in many cases more to do with such changes than variations of
temperature. The seasons, again, are less marked in the tropics
than in temperate and circumpolar climates. Nevertheless, even near
the equator, they exert and have always exerted certain organic
influences-have resulted in annual cycles in the life of species.
Even before the coming on of the Glacial epoch, the seasons were
probably somewhat more marked in the temperate and polar regions than
in the tropics, the longer day in summer and the greater directness
of impact of the rays making the summer months always warmer. But
for various reasons, among which we may presumably rank the absence
in early ages of high land at the poles and of an accumulated polar
ice cap, together with the existence of warm sea currents from the
tropics to the poles, the winters of preglacial ages seem to have
been relatively mild, perhaps (if we may judge by the types of plant
life) milder than those of South Carolina and Georgia in our own
period. No cold winds of importance seem then to have blown with
blighting effect from glaciated or snow-clad districts. (Mars in our
own time appears to enjoy winters somewhat of this character, though
a little colder, with a temporary snow cap.) The seasons as we know
them in temperate and arctic climates, however, seem to be largely
the result of the glacial epoch, and its persistent legacy the arctic
and antarctic ice caps. If we could once manage to get rid of those,
it is possible that our planet might again enjoy in all its zones the
mild and genial preglacial winters.
These are rough notes, I know; mere adumbrations of a probable
truth: but adequately to develop the subject would require a very
big volume. My object here is simply to suggest that in many
inquiries, both into human and animal or vegetable life, we must
never take the existence of seasons as we know them for granted,
except in very recent times. The year, for organic beings, means
essentially the seasons; and the seasons may mean and have meant
many separate things, as time and place vary--heat and cold, food
and scarcity, foliage and leaflessness, drought and wet; longer or
shorter days, the midnight sun and the winter darkness; hibernation
and wakefulness; the egg, the cocoon, the seed, the plant, the
flower, the fruit; dormancy or vitality. According as human life
started at the poles or the equator, for instance, it would view in
the beginning many things differently. All I wish to point out now
is merely this, that we must bear such possibilities ever in mind;
and that we must never take it for granted in any problem, human or
biological, that the seasons were always just what we know them,
or that the year to any organic being meant anything more than the
seasonal cycle then and there prevalent.--_Longman's Magazine._
* * * * *
In the excavations of the ancient cemetery of Antinoe, near Lyons,
France, a "party dress" of the time of the Emperor Adrian, very
fine silks, jewels, etc., have been discovered. One sarcophagus
held the remains of a woman musician with a rose chemise, a
cythara, pearls, castanets, etc.; in another was a child's costume
with its little laced shoes, its vest ornamented with flowers
_appliqués_, and its robe of gauffered crape. It appears that the
women of sixteen hundred years ago dyed their hair with henna, and
twisted ribbons round their heads. Nothing changes.
M. A. Thieullen, publishing the results of fifteen years'
studies among the flint implements of the French beds, draws the
conclusions that the elaborate palæolithic flint axe and hammer
and the typical neolithic implements were luxuries used by the
more distinguished members or for the more important purposes of
the flint-implement-using community, while the ruder implements
which are found in enormous numbers were the objects of general
and daily use throughout all the flint-using ages, whether
palæolithic or neolithic.
BRAIN WEIGHTS AND INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY.
BY JOSEPH SIMMS, M. D.
Having been for thirty years a lecturer on man and his character
as evinced by his form, features, head, and gestures, and having
made observations on the subject in all parts of North America, in
continental Europe and Great Britain, and parts of Asia, Africa, and
Australia, I should not be deemed presumptuous when I present a few
facts regarding the relations of mind and the size and forms of heads
and weights of brains. It has been observed by many persons versed
in the branches relating to the subject that men with the largest
brains are not those of most talent, power, or intellect; but many
such have been only ordinary or inferior men, or even idiots; while
some men of most powerful and comprehensive minds have had unusually
small brains. Esquirol's assertion that no size or form of head or
brain is incident to idiocy or to superior talent is borne out by my
observations.
After long and careful research in the great libraries and museums
of the world, I have collected a table of brain weights of eminent
men, along with which are entered, in my original document, the
occupation of the subject, age at the time of determination, and the
source whence the item is derived. These can not be given within the
limits of this article, and only the briefest and most generalized
summary of the main features can be indicated. The largest weight of
brain in the whole list is that of the Russian novelist Turgenieff,
whose brain weighed, at the time of his death, at sixty-five years
of age, 71 ounces.[32] It is a considerable step from him to the
next in order, the English mechanician and author, Knight, whose
brain weight at the age of fifty-eight was 64 ounces. Then follow the
Scottish physician Abercrombie, 63 ounces; General B. F. Butler, 62
ounces; and the Scottish general Abercromby, 62 ounces. Another group
of nine, including weights from 58.6 ounces to 54 ounces, includes
Jeffrey, Scottish judge and author, Thackeray, Cuvier, George Combe,
United States Senator Atherton, Spurzheim, and the Scottish physician
Simpson. The next group, 53.6 to 50, is larger, including twenty-one
names, among which are Daniel Webster, Agassiz, Napoleon I, the
Scottish divine Chalmers, the mathematicians De Morgan and Gauss, the
anthropologist Broca, and the generals Skoboleff and Lamarque. The
last group, 49.9 to 40 ounces, contains twenty-five names, including
those of the philosopher Huber, Grote, Babbage, the anthropologist
Bertillon, Whewell,[33] Liebig, Gall, Gambetta, and Bishop, the mind
reader. Only one remove from the foot of the list is Gambetta, a man
of indisputably high genius and ability, with a brain weighing only
40.9 ounces.[34]
The table goes to illustrate a general rule which I discovered and
published several years ago, that larger brains appertain to natives
of colder climates. Dr. John Abercrombie, for instance, was born
at Aberdeen, Scotland, on the German Sea, and farther north than
any part of the United States. Sir Ralph Abercromby was born in
the county of Clackmannan, Scotland, where it is far colder than
any part of southern Europe. Lord Francis Jeffrey first saw light
in Edinburgh. General Butler was born in Deerfield, New Hampshire.
Ivan Turgenieff, with the heaviest brain of all, was a native of
cold, inhospitable Russia. Dr. Franz Joseph Gall (brain weight 42.2
ounces)[35] was born in Würtemberg, in southern Germany, passed
most of his life in Vienna and Paris, and, being a student, spent
much of his time indoors. Gambetta was born at Cahors, France, of
Italian parents. This climatological view of the size of brains
is confirmed by a paper, "Crania," of the Philadelphia Academy of
Sciences, which gives as the average size, in cubic inches, of the
cranial cavities of various nationalities, taking the results of many
measurements: Lapps, 102; Swedes, 100; Anglo-Saxons, 96; Finns, 95;
Anglo-Americans, 94; Germans, 92; Celts, 88; Malays, 86; Chinese, 85;
Tombs of Gizeh, 84; embalmed Semitic, 82; Egyptians, 80; Fellah, 79;
Bengalese, 78.
A table of average brain weights of various nationalities,
compiled from Topinard's and Manouvrier's works and other standard
anthropological publications, illustrates the same tendency toward
greater brain weights in colder countries. One of its results is to
show that the colder air of the United States produces larger brains
in the negroes than the warm air of Africa. The table further shows,
in the comparisons of Hindus and African negroes, that the brains are
smallest in the warmest countries, irrespective of race or nation;
and that the largest average attained is in Scotland, where it is
never extremely warm.
The measurement of the cranial cavity is a very uncertain gauge of
the size of the brain, for the cerebro-spinal fluid may occupy a
large share of the space. Weighing the brain is without doubt the
only scientifically certain method of determining its size and mass.