The Moetal Remaps of Stvedenboeg 61 



Still more illustrative results are obtained by the method of re- 

 construction, by which one, so to speak, clothes the bony frame anew 

 with its enveloping layers of skin, muscles and other soft parts. 



Apart from the paleontologists' attempts to reconstruct the soft 

 parts on the skeletons of fossil animals, to thus gain an approximate 

 conception of the shape and proportions of these animals during life, 

 this method has first been used by W. His n & n for the purpose 

 of identifying the skull of Johann Sebastian Bach. In this case it was 

 desired, while digging for building operations in the St. Johannis Church- 

 yard in Leipsic, 1894, to try to find the forgotten burial place of Bach, 

 and to secure any remains which might be preserved. Guided by certain 

 old statements, suspicions had been directed to a special place and a 

 particular skeleton, for which reason a minute examination of the cra- 

 nium belonging to it was entered upon. After this examination had 

 brought to light that the skull, in point of age, sex, etc., might be the 

 genuine one. His commissioned the sculptor C. Seffner to model a 

 bust of Bach upon a plaster cast of the cranium, with the guidance of 

 existing portraits, and taking especial care that the layer of clay corre- 

 sponding to the soft parts should have a thickness in agreement with 

 established anatomical measurements. The experiment was a complete 

 success, rendering a highly important support to the supposition that 

 the skull really was Bach's. 



The plastic reconstructive method has, so far as I know, on no 

 other occasion served for the direct identification of crania^ but it was 

 used by Kollmann u on a cranium of the stone-age, by Füest 7 on 

 a mediaeval skull, and by Meekel i8 on a prehistoric and an Australian 

 skull, chiefly in order to control the practicability of the method, which, 

 moreover, has been further developed and perfected especially by Koll- 

 MANN. According to his directions, which I principally followed, there 

 are built, on certain fixed spots on a plaster cast of the cranium, little 

 pyramids of plaster whose height must be in exact agreement with 

 the average thickness of the soft covering in the corresponding places, 

 after which the soft parts are modelled in clay or some other plastic 

 material, strict care being taken that the points indicated by the tops 

 of the pyramids shall he level with the surface of the future image. 



In order to make use of this method, one must know the thick- 

 ness of the soft covering parts on the various regions of the head. 



^ Plane profile reconstructions, on the contrary, have been made for the same pur- 

 pose by Welcker 35. 



