If you have not heard of a head-spanner, you won't have been to the Wellcome Collection's fascinating new exhibition, Brains: the Mind as Matter. As the curators put it, the theme of the exhibition is not so much what our brains have done for us, as what we have done to our brains. Here you will find the curious as well as the beautiful, the sinister alongside the dextrous. And, since you ask, the tool i n question? Not something from Frankenstein's neurosurgery clinic, but, perhaps as troublingly, from the laboratory of Charles Darwin's polymathic cousin, Francis Galton. With this kind of three-dimensional ruler he tried to measure evolution through the metrication, the spanning, of the human skull.
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