866 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 



* Etruscan Tyrol or Inca Peruvian ; ' and one of the most celebrated 

 anthropotomists of the day has been so impressed with the fact that 

 Peruvian as well as Javanese and Ethiopian skulls may be found on 

 living shoulders within the precincts of a single German university 

 town, that he has busied himself with forming a pseudo-typical 

 ethnological series from the source and area just indicated. Great 

 has been the scandal thence accruing to craniography, and the col- 

 lector of skulls has thence come to be looked upon as a dilettante 

 with singular ghoul-like propensities, which are pardonable only 

 because they relate to savage races of modern days, or to cemeteries 

 several hundred years old, but which are not to be regarded as 

 being seriously scientific. Now to me the existence of such a way 

 of estimating such a work appears to argue a sad amount of ignor- 

 ance of the laws of the logic of practical life, or, indeed, of the 

 chapters on ' approximate generalisations,' which any man, however 

 unpractical, can read in a treatise on logic. A man's features and 

 physiognomy are instinctively and intuitively, or, if you prefer so 

 to put it, as a result of the accumulated social experiences of 

 generations of men, taken as a more or less valuable and trust- 

 worthy indication of his character ; were this not so, photographers 

 would not, as I apprehend, and hope they do, make fortunes ; yet 

 the face is at least as often fallacious as an index of the mind as the 

 skull is fallacious as an index of race. The story of the misconception 

 by a physiognomist of the character of Socrates is familiar to us, 

 as I think, from Lempriere's Dictionary; and it may serve to 

 parallel the story which Blumenbach and Tilesius tell us of the 

 exact correspondence of the proportions of a skull from Nukahiva 

 with those of the Apollo Belvidere. The living faces in a gaol, 

 again, to put the same argument upon other grounds, are as 

 dangerous to judge from as are the skulls in a museum ; yet every 

 detective is something like a professor of physiognomy, and most of 

 them could write a good commentary on Lavater. The true state 

 of the case may, perhaps, be represented thus : — A person who has 

 had a large series of crania through his hands, of the authenticity of 

 which, as to place and data, he has himself had evidence, might express 

 himself, perhaps, somewhat to the following effect if he were asked 

 whether he had gathered from his examination of such a series any 

 confidence as to his power of referring to, or excluding from, any 

 such series any skull which he had not seen before. He might say, 



