DR. ZERFFI, F. R. Hist. S., recently delivered the first of the
inaugural lectures in connection with the opening of the Crystal
Palace Company's School of Art, on "The Racial Characteristics of Man
Scientifically Traced in General History." He complained that the study
of man from a scientific point of view, especially in history as enacted
by him, was mostly neglected, although it ought to be--nay, would and
must more and more become--our most important subject, as forming the
only real basis of all our higher culture. History was undoubtedly a
deductive science, but it could be verified and put to the best uses by
the purely inductive study of facts. Any change, whether progressive or
retrospective, in the social, political, or religious condition of men,
would be a fact. The acting forces were men, of whom there were on the
globe more than a thousand millions, all endowed with three principal
faculties--of receiving impressions, which produced sensations, and were
reflected in their intellectual consciousness. But neither in comparing
individuals with one another, nor race with race, were these faculties
equally developed. They varied with a race's average facial angles and
lines, its amount of brain, the color of its skin, and its general
organization. The facial angle of the black races might be taken at 85 deg.,
and the number of cubic inches of brain might range between 75 and 80.
In an ethnological chart hung behind the lecturer, the main body of the
Nigritian races, which was made up of the Asiatic and African negroes,
was credited with 83 cubic inches of brain as a general statement. It
was remarked however, that the brain was very small relatively to the
body, while the cerebellum formed a very large portion of the organ.
The statical and dynamical forces of the intellect were said to be
undeveloped, the animal propensities predominating. The long extinct
American Toltecs, ranking as one section of a subdivision under this