OUT-SIZE BRAINS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 November 1940, Page 3

OUT-SIZE BRAINS

WEIGHT AND MENTALITY. Medical experts who performed the recent autopsy on Leon Trotsky were impressed by the size of his brain. It weighed three and a half pounds, one of the biggest ever encountered by Mexican doctors. The largest brain in recorded medical history was that of Ivan Turgeneff. The nineteenth-century Russian novelist had a brain weighing four pounds ten ounces. Next largest known was the brain of Daniel Webster, the American statesman. Does the size of the brain afford a true measure of mentality? It has never been proved that an over-size brain connotes genius, but there is evidence that diminutive brains go with mental defectives. Dr R. J. A. Berry, formerly Professor of Anatomy at the University of Melbourne, made thousands of skull measurements, and found that mentally defective children had brains on the average 20 per cent smaller than normal. He also investigated the difference between various categories of criminals, and discovered that a group of embezzlers had 100 cubic centimeters more brain capacity on the average than a group of common cattle rustlers. —The New York “Times Magazine.”