REVIEWS — DEFORMED FRAGMENTARY SKULL. 487 



tion," Lady Wardlaw so eflPectually concealed the subsequent aiithor- 

 sliip of twenty-two of the finest, most tender and vigorous, of all the 

 romantic ballads of Scotland, from her family and her descendants, 

 that it is left for an ingenious literary antiquary, some hundred and 

 thirty years after her death, to make the discovery from internal evi- 

 dence alone ; and to assure us that " The hand which was stiff and 

 somewhat puerile in Hardyknute, had acquired freedom and breadth 

 of style' in those deserted foundlings of her muse ! The lady, be it 

 remembered, w^as in her forty-second year when her first peurile poem 

 was printed, and still older when she claimed its authorship by the 

 production of additional stanzas, which are fully as puerile as the rest. 

 As her death took place, only eight years after the former date, and 

 with a shorter interval after the latter, the utmost period we can allow 

 for the development of the " puerile style " of HardyTcnute into the 

 " freedom and breadth of style," of the supposed twenty-two later 

 productions is singularly brief ; especially when we consider the mature 

 age of the supposed authoress. The idea is just one of those plausible 

 fancies which prove so temptingly fascinating to the originator, from 

 their very boldness, that we do not wonder at seeing the ample expan- 

 sion of the first sceptical anatomising of Sir Patrich Spence, into the 

 final comprehension of the whole romantic ballad literature of Scotland 

 under the same Pitreavie classification. It required a peculiarly 

 calm temperament to resist the seductions of a theory which, if 

 established, would give to Scottish literature a Chattertonian poetess, 

 little, if at all, inferior in intellectual rank to " the marvellous boy " 

 whom the world accredits with the authorship of the Rowley m.anu- 

 scripts. D. W. 



Description of a deformed fragmentary SJcull, found in an ancient 

 Quarry-cave at Jerusalem ; with an attempt to determine hy its con- 

 figuration alone, the ethnical type to which if helongs. By J. 

 Aitken Meigs, M, D. Philadelphia : Merrihew and Thompson, 

 1859. 



Dr. Meigs, the able cataloguer of the Morton Collection of Crania, 

 in the Cabinet of the Academy of Sciences of Philadelphia, embo- 

 dies in this elaborate and careful thesis the results of an ingenious 

 exhaustive process by which he has aimed at determining the 



