Brain

Helen Hamilton Gardener, an author and the only female member of the U. S. Civil Service Commission, recently died (TIME, Aug. 17). Among other things which she left in her will was her brain, bequeathed to the Cornell Brain Association to prove her life-long contention that the brain of a woman is not inherently inferior to that of a man.

Last week the gruesome package arrived at Ithaca. Scientists bore it to their laboratory. Dr. James W. Papez, Secretary of the Association, began a preliminary study of the specimen.

He described it as normal, well proportioned, well preserved. He weighed it. It weighed 1,150 grams, exactly the same weight as the brain of Dr. Burt G. Wilder, who contributed his brain to the Association last January.

Weight does not count much (the convolutions are more important) in determining the ability of a brain, but in so far as weight may be taken as a guide, Mrs. Gardener by the bequest of her brain placed herself in formidable company.

For Burt Green Wilder, born in 1841, was graduated from Lawrence Scientific School (Harvard) in 1862 in anatomia summa cum laude. He served in the Civil War as surgeon of the 55th Massachusetts Infantry (colored). Afterward he became curator of herpetology for the Boston Society of Natural History, professor of neurology and vertebrate zoology at Cornell. He was a member of the advisory council of the Simplified Spelling Board, Vice President of the Non-Smokers Protective League, etc., etc. He wrote the only article that ever appeared in the Atlantic Monthly with illustration--the story of how he reeled 150 yards of silk from a spider in South Carolina and later wove the silk into a ribbon.

He studied nearly 2,000 brains of vertebrate animals including 13 educated persons. He advocated simplification of anatomic names, the dissection of cats as prerequisite to that of man, the use of chloroform in capital punishment, etc. He wrote What Young People Should Know, The Brain of the Sheep, and many other books and papers, chiefly on the brain. In 1910 he became emeritus at Cornell, but continued to lecture and write. He wrote the words and music of Fiat Justitia, an international hymn for the first Universal Races Congress. He set Old Ironsides (by Oliver Wendell Holmes) and The Peacemaker (by Joyce Kilmer) to music. Before he died he set to work upon a history of the 55th Mass. Infantry.

Mrs. Gardener, with a brain of 1,150 grams is indeed in honorable company.