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The author has set himself the painstaking, if not thankless task, of getting together all of the evidence on the relation between physique and intellect and analyzing it for the purpose of determining its real value. The amount of work that has been done upon correlating these two aspects of the human individual is very considerable, and the work of evaluating it was no small job.
Despite the fact that from the beginning of time, since man has been
thinking about such things, at least he has always been inclined to believe that there was some relationship between bodily make-up and mental make-up, the author does not indicate that researches along this line have been very fruitful. In fact, and in brief, the net result of his meticulous survey of the field is to the effect that there is no correlation between physique and intellect,—that intelligence, which incidentally he does not define, probably for the very good reason that he cannot, and bodily make-up, as expressed in such characteristics as size and weight and height, head proportions, skeletal development, dentition, etc., are independent variables between which no correlation has been shown. This conclusion is reached despite the fact that many of those who conducted the researches along these lines came to opposite opinions, that the author believes that these were due to faulty statistical methods,—in general due to the fact that they used simple averages to arrive at their results and did not develop scatter diagrams nor treat the statistics with a view to determining the coefficients of correlation. When this was done the apparent relationships between intellect and the various aspects of the physique disappeared.
The work as a whole is therefore an interesting piece of negative evidence, but it is negative evidence which, so far as the reviewer is concerned, leaves him unconvinced, and this lack of conviction is due to a number of circumstances which might be described altogether as what he feels to b