7 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Every large penitentiary in Anglo-Saxondom has inmates who might 

 pose for any saint in the Roman almanac, while an honest village-priest 

 of Southern Bavaria may combine in his face the deformities of 

 Breughel's seven devils by indulging in salted pork, lager-bier, and 

 sauerkraut. Some years ago I passed a few days at Brownsville, Texas, 

 during the session of the United States District Court. The cause cele- 

 bre of the season was the case of Francisco Hernandez, a Mexican ban- 

 dit, who had infested the Rio Grande frontier for more than three 

 years before he was caught in his favorite trick of robbing the poor 

 farm-houses of his countrymen, whenever the absence of the able- 

 bodied males gave him a chance of executing his designs with a mini- 

 mum risk to his own skin. Though he assured the court that he had 

 no hard feelings against any of his victims, he had been obliged, in 

 the line of his business, to kill eight different persons all females and 

 minors. His last enterprise had involved a hand-to-hand fight with a 

 stout old woman, who broke his left arm before he dispatched her. 

 He was tracked to the Rio Grande, and, trying to swim the river in 

 his crippled condition, saw himself obliged to turn back into pistol - 

 range of his pursuers, was captured, and arraigned for five murders in 

 the second and three in the first degree. I strolled into the coui*t-house 

 while his trial was going on, expecting to see one of those bull-necked 

 old cut-throats of the negroid type, who abound in this region of mur- 

 der and mixed races. He proved to be a pale-faced creole, of some 

 eighteen or twenty years, slender-built, modest-spoken, and resigned- 

 looking to a pathetic degree. His profile was absolutely perfect, and 

 the same might have been said of his eyes, if their look had not been 

 too ghost-like spiritual to leave an agreeable impression. Csesar Bor- 

 gia, the natural son of Pope Alexander VI, was at once the wickedest 

 and handsomest man of his time. The fiend who aggravated the guilt 

 of the most unheard-of crimes by perpetrating them in the name of a 

 sentimental religion wore a face which, in the words of Delia Porta, 

 might inspire a saint to live up to every sublime precept of that creed. 

 The mere sound of his voice succeeded where the arguments of others 

 failed ; his eye could beam with the inspiration of a prophet while he 

 meditated those fatti assassini to which the records of the most bar- 

 barous nations furnish scarcely a parallel. It is a pity that his skuH 

 has not been preserved, though we need not doubt that it did exhibit 

 all those fine " developments " that were necessary to harmonize with 

 such a face. 



Caesar Borgia had hostile biographers, who may have exaggerated 

 his faults, and artist-friends who, perhaps, flattered him in portraits ; 

 but the same can not be said of Mohammed II, the conqueror of 

 Constantinople, whose crimes were palliated by his abject courtiers, 

 and to whose majestic beauty his enemies bear witness. The histo- 

 rian Phranza, who lost his fortune and his country in the downfall of 

 the Byzantine Empire, and whose only son was stabbed by the hand 



