V - The brain of the Aboriginal Australian. A study in cerebral morphology

Abstract
The problem of the interpretation of the brain in terms of intellectual capacity and racial difference has been one of profound interest since the time when Gall first put forward his conceptions of cerebral localization. The relationship of the anatomical pattern, both macroscopic and microscopic, to functional localization is naturally in the final analysis the end of all morphological studies. Our knowledge of these relations has greatly increased since the time when CUNNINGHAM, RETZIUS, and others wrote their descriptive accounts of the cerebral hemispheres ; but it cannot yet be said that studies in morphology have reached that level of perfection which warrants the study of anatomy being subordinated to the background of physiology. Thanks to the labours of TURNER, CUNNINGHAM, ELLIOT SMITH, CAMPBELL, BRODMANN, and many others, morphological and, to a certain extent, functional significance can be given to many of the sulci. Further, the arrangement of the sulci can be to some extent used as an index to the relative amount of the expansion of the newly acquired areas in the human brain. Despite this, the views of KEITH are substantially true :— “ Unfortunately our knowledge of the areas, convolutions, and furrows of the frontal region of the human brain has not yet reached that stage which permits us to say that this or that marking has such and such a meaning ; we cannot yet read the functional capacities of any given brain by a study of its external appearances. We have every right to believe that our knowledge will increase, and that some day experts will be able to determine the functional significance of the appearance seen on such endocranial casts as that obtained from the Galilean frontal bone".

This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit: