GENIUS AND STATURE 581 



feet 5 inches, Beethoven, who is described as " scarcely over 5 feet 4, 

 Vienna measure/' John Keats ("little over 5 feet"), Stephen A. 

 Douglass ("scarcely over 5 feet") and Swinburne and Whistler, whose 

 statures are given as " five feet or so." We should add, however, that 

 the figures as to Swinburne and Whistler, like those with reference to 

 Edward Fitzgerald in an earlier paragraph, were derived not from 

 authoritative biographies, as in the case of all the other names, but 

 from magazine articles which chanced to come under the writer's 

 observation while pursuing these investigations. 



As " short " or " under medium height " we find John Quincey 

 Adams, Andrew Carnegie, William Ellery Channing, Chaucer, Alex- 

 ander Hamilton ("much below"), Ibsen, Charles Lamb, Napoleon 

 Bonaparte, Thomas B. Macaulay, John Milton, Thomas Moore, Alex- 

 ander Pope, Bobespierre, Savanarola, Wm. H. Seward ("small"), 

 Thoreau, Martin Van Buren, Chopin and Michael Angelo. 



The materialist who believes life and personality are but the flores- 

 cence of physical forces, and the brain not the urn but the creative 

 agent of thought, may rejoice over the fact that of those men of genius 

 who were low in stature no few are expressly mentioned as having had 

 large heads — namely, Stephen A. Douglass, Alexander Hamilton, 

 Charles Lamb, Macaulay, Napoleon and Beethoven. On the other 

 hand, he will be confronted by the fact that a number of tall men of a 

 high order of talent have possessed craniums of proportions not cal- 

 culated to inspire respect — notably Chief Justice Marshall, Washington, 

 Captain Cook and, in a peculiar degree, the poet Shelley, who shared 

 this characteristic with his fellow minstrels Byron and Keats. 



The circumstance is a curious one, if our catalogue of names may 

 be relied upon as a basis for deduction, that naval commanders have 

 been of low stature. The fact that coast-dwellers, unlike mountain- 

 peoples and forest-folk, are usually short in body may not be without 

 a bearing upon this ; since sea-faring men are apt to spring from coast- 

 dwelling races. 



The roll of names and statures which we have given suffers in its 

 usefulness because of the undue predominance of American names. 

 The effect of this is plainly to heighten the average stature. The need 

 of a table of names, sufficiently large to obviate errors from non-essen- 

 tial causes, and carefully sifted so as to exclude men of merely accidental 

 distinction, is a condition which meets the inquirer at the threshold of 

 the subject, and even this table of names would have to be grouped by 

 races and regions, and separately studied, in order that comparisons 

 within each region and nationality might be made. 



