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- Author: Maria Montessori
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In the presence of such a multiplicity of questions we must proceed, not to a selection but to a sum. Every biological phenomenon is the result of a number of factors. The development of the brain depends in precisely the same way as the development of the whole body or of a single muscle, upon the combined influence of biological factors determining the individual variability, and of factors of environment, principal among which are nutrition and exercise. A suitable diet aids growth, and so also does a rational exercise; but underlying all the rest, as a potential cause, is the biological factor which mysteriously assigns a certain predestination to each individual. The environment may combat, alter, and impede what nature "had written upon the fertilised ovum;" but we cannot forget that this scheme, pre-established by the natural order of life, is the principal factor among them all, the one which determines the "character of the individual."
Now, on the basis of this influence of the biological factor upon the cerebral development, we may affirm that: to greater intelligence there corresponds a brain more developed in volume. What gives us proof of this is the brain of the exceptional man—of men of genius, who frequently have heads of extraordinary volume.
Persons of high celebrity, and not those, for example, who have become known through some recent discovery in the field of positive science—since a piece of good fortune may coincide with a normal cranial volume—but the true creative geniuses who have left the deep imprint of themselves upon their immortal works, have generally had a cerebral volume that was truly gigantic: the poetic brain of the great Schiller weighed 1,785 grams, that of Cuvier, the naturalist, 1,829 grams, that of the great statesman, Cromwell, 2,231 grams, and lastly, that of Byron, 2,238 grams. The brain of the normal man weighs about 1,400 grams.
Consequently, these are extraordinary volumetric figures that could not be acquired, either by much eating, or by being educated according to the scientific means of the most advanced pedagogy; they are due to the extraordinary biological potentiality of the man of genius.
In these extraordinary heads the exceptional volume is combined with a characteristic form: they always have a more than normal development of the forehead. Even in the course of biological evolution, as we have already seen, in the higher species a greater cerebral volume has a correspondingly broader and more erect forehead. If we examine portraits of men of genius, what strikes us chiefly in them is the high and spacious brow, as though men of genius, in comparison with the rest of us, were representatives of a superior race. But if the portrait shows the face taken in profile, it will be easily observed that the direction of the forehead is not vertical, but even slightly recessive; that is, it preserves the characteristic male form, with the vault slightly inclined backward and the orbital arches slightly pronounced.
The Pretended Cerebral Inferiority of Woman.—One final argument, which is of interest to us, is the great question of the relation between cerebral volume and intelligence in woman. Because, as you know, there is a very widespread belief of long standing that is confirmed in the name of science: that woman is biologically, in other words totally, inferior, that the volume of her brain is condemned by nature to an inferiority against which nothing can prevail. Just as our perfected pedagogy, excellent alimentation and improved hygienic conditions could never endow a normal man with the brain of a genius, in the same way, so it is said, it is impossible ever to augment the size of the brain of woman, who is necessarily condemned to resign herself to remain in that state of social inferiority to which she is now reduced and from which she would in vain attempt to emancipate herself.
Names as famous as that of Lombroso[40] which are associated with the progress of positive science, lend the weight of their authority to this form of condemnation! And it is not easy to do away with this sort of prejudice, which has slowly been disseminated among the people under the guise of a scientific theory. But to-day there are scientists who have been impelled to make certain extremely minute, impartial and objective studies, without any preconception on the subject—such men as Messedaglia, Dubois, Lapique, Zanolli, and Manouvrier—who, by calculating the cerebral mass, at one time in comparison with the whole body, at another with the surface of the body, and still again with the various active or skeletal parts of the organism—have arrived at an opposite conclusion: namely, that they can demonstrate a greater development of brain in woman. Among these scientists it gives me pleasure to name before all others Manouvrier—one of the most gifted anthropologists of our day—who has devoted twenty years to an exceedingly minute study of this problem. Here in brief outline are his method of procedure and his conclusions. That the cerebral volume should be considered in its relation to the stature is a familiar principle; but a comparison between man and woman based solely upon such a proportion, continues to maintain the cerebral inferiority of woman. Have we, however, the right to compare a volumetric measure (the cerebral mass) with a linear measure (the stature)? Such a comparison is a mathematical error, as we have already technically proved. Accordingly we find that Manouvrier compares the brain with the mass of the whole body, its entire bulk; and he analyzes this entire bulk, considering separately its active parts, without troubling himself about their functional potentiality. He deduces from them certain figures and proportions; more than that, he forms a sort of index, which might be called the "index of sexual mass," between woman (minor mass) and man, reduced to a scale of 100—which may be summed up in an equation: man:100 = woman:the following percentual analyses:
Stature and weight of body 88.5 Weight of brain 90.0 Weight of skeleton (femur) 62.5 CO2 exhaled in twenty-four hours 64.5 Vital capacity (at age of eighteen) 72.6 Strength of hands 57.1 Strength of vertical traction 52.6Hence it is evident, that, in comparison with her actual organic mass, woman differs from man far more than is indicated by the differences in stature and in bodily weight.
Instead of taking all these various separate mean measurements, let us take one single comprehensive mean resulting from them: woman:man = 80:100; there we have the proportion. Now, Manouvrier proceeds to reduce all the separate measurements of man from 100 to 80, and calculates how much brain man would lose if he were reduced to a mass having feminine limits; he finds that the loss would be 172 grams. Woman on the contrary has only 150 grams of brain less than man. Consequently the cerebral volume of woman is superior to that of man!
This is an anthropological superiority which is further revealed in the more perfected form of the cranium, insomuch as woman has an absolutely erect forehead and has no remaining traces of the supraorbital arches (characteristics of superiority in the species).
Thus, we have a contradiction between existing anthropological and social conditions: woman, whom anthropology regards as a being having the cranium of an almost superior race, continues to be relegated to an unquestioned social inferiority, from which it is not easy to raise her.
Who is Socially Superior?—But here again we may ask, as we did regarding the question of intelligence: What constitutes social superiority? And in our social environment who is superior and who is inferior?
Fig. 83.—Leptoprosopic face.
Fig. 84.—Chameprosopic face.
Fig. 85.—Lina Cavalieri.
Fig. 86.—Maria Mancini.
Social superiority, like moral superiority, is the product of evolution. In primitive times when men, in order to live, were limited like animals to gathering the spontaneous fruit of the earth, according to the poetry of the biblical legend, and according to what sociology repeats to-day, the superior man was the one of largest stature, the giant. People paid him homage because he was the most imposing, without troubling themselves to ask whether, or not, he might be insane. In this way Saul was the first king. When the time came that men were no longer content to live on the spontaneous fruit of the earth, but were forced to till the soil, then a new victory was inaugurated, the victory of the more active and intelligent man. David killed Goliath. This great Bible story marks the moment when the superiority of man came to be considered under a more advanced and spiritual aspect. When the men who cultivated the earth began to feel the need of other neighbouring lands and became conquerors, then the soldier was evolved, until in the middle ages there resulted such a triumph of militarism that the nobles alone were conquerors in war; and the persons who to-day would be called superior, the men of intellect, the poets, were considered as feeble folk, despicable and effeminate. In our own times, now that the great conquests of the earth have been made and the victorious people consequently brought into harmony, the moment has come for conquering the environment itself, in order to wring from it new bread and new wealth. And this is the proud work of human intelligence which creates by aiding all the forces of nature and by triumphing over its environment; thus to-day it is the man of intelligence who is superior. But it seems as though a new epoch were in preparation, a truly human epoch, and as though the end had almost come of those evolutionary periods which sum up the history of the heroic struggles of humanity; an epoch in which an assured peace will promote the brotherhood of man, while morality and love will take their place as the highest form of human superiority. In such an epoch there will really be superior human beings, there will really be men strong in morality and in sentiment. Perhaps in this way the reign of woman is approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological superiority will be deciphered. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honour, and in these respects man always has yielded woman the palm.
Face and VisageThe Limits of the Face.—The face is that part of the head which remains when the cranial cavity is not considered. To attempt to separate accurately, in the skeleton, the facial from the cerebral portion would involve a lengthy anatomical description; for our purpose it is enough to grasp the general idea that the face is the portion situated beneath the forehead, bounded in front by the curves of the eyebrows, and in profile by a line passing in projection through the auricular foramen and the external orbital apophysis (Fig. 39, page (188)).
It is customary during life to consider the entire anterior portion of the head as constituting one single whole, bounded above by the line formed by the roots of the hair, and below by the chin. This portion includes actually not only the face but a portion of the cerebral cranium as well, namely, the forehead; it bears the name of the visage and is considered under this aspect only during life.
Human Characteristics of the Face.—One characteristic of the human cranium, as we have already seen (Fig. 40), as compared with animals, is the decrease in size of the face, and especially of the jaw-bones in inverse proportion to the increase of the cranial volume.
"Man," says Cuvier, "is of all living animals the one that has the largest cranium and the smallest face; and animals are stupider and more ferocious as they
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