MEASURING HEADS I 4 Iknow—as if it mattered at all—whether blacks, on the average, have
larger or smaller brains than whites. Yet the larger size of white
brains was an unquestioned "fact" among white scientists until
quite recently.
Many investigators have devoted an extraordinary amount of
attention to the subject of group differences in human brain size.
They have gotten nowhere, not because there are no answers, but
because the answers are so difficult to get and because the a priori
convictions are so clear and controlling. In the heat of Broca's de-
bate with Gratiolet, one of Broca's defenders, admittedly as a nasty
debating point, made a remark that admirably epitomizes the moti-
vations implicit in the entire craniometric tradition: "I have noticed
for a long time," stated de Jou vencel (1861, p. 465), "that, in general,
those who deny the intellectual importance of the brain's volume
have small heads." Self-interest, for whatever reason, has been the
wellspring of opinion on this heady issue from the start.