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The Museum Gazette 



importance to the shape and size of the skull, and to the 

 features, as affording some clue to character. 



Not perhaps quite so much as you have supposed. You 

 may by a man's features diagnose his race, and when you 

 have got at his race you may guess at his character. 



You think that race proclivities are permanent ? 



They may be diluted but they are never wholly lost. 



Did you seriously mean to trace for Goethe a Jewish 

 pedigree ? 



Yes, but a diluted strain. It does not follow because a 

 man is born in Frankfort that none of his ancestors were 

 born in Palestine. I have no belief in the development of 

 transcendent genius from a newly civilised people such as 

 the German Teutons. You must remember Goethe's face : 

 his arched nose, his black Italian eyes and the character of 

 his life-work. He was no unmixed Teuton. 



You seem to think lightly of the Teuton stock. 



By no means — it is an excellent one. A noble minded 

 race ; but as to civilisation and developed intellect a quite 

 modern one. 



You think possibly that in other instances the genius which 

 we credit to Germany is really in part of Hebrew origin ? 



Yes, certainly, and in many other places. The dispersal of 

 the Jews was, as well as that of the Greeks, an event of the 

 utmost importance for the advance of the mental culture 

 of Europe. I would like, if you will allow me, to read 

 to you half a page from an article in Temple Bar which 

 interested me much after dinner yesterday. The paper was 

 on Russian literature, and more especially on Korolenko, the 

 novelist. It quoted from Dostoyevsky, who said of his 

 countrymen : — 



" We have one trait widely different from anything in the European 

 — a high capacity for synthesis, a talent for a universal reconciliation, 

 an all-humanness. There is nothing in us like the European angu- 

 larity — no impermeability, no stiffness. Our character easily accom- 

 modates itself to everybody, adapts itself to every kind of life. It 



