THE CRANIUM OF SOPHOCLES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 9335, 19 October 1893, Page 6

THE CRANIUM OF SOPHOCLES.

Amongst the treasure-trove which has come to light lately as the result of Hellenic excavation (says the Lancet) none has been more enthusiastically heralded than that which was discovered the other day at Deceleianamely, the cranium of Sophocles. Already it has been sought to throw a damper on the delight of the discovery by suggesting doubts as to its authenticity— and certainly-the Greek record us to such " salvage from antiquity," whether it be a coin or a manuscript, a tomb or a cranium, is not so invariably unsullied as to absolve the finder from the most stringent proofs of bona fides ; controversy round this latest prize of archa;ology has waxed so warm, indeed, that an arbiter has had to be appointed—an arbiter who to classical learning adds the scarcely less appropriate qualification of anatomical and paloeontological knowledge. Professor Virchow, of Berlin, is the authority to whom the contending camps have consented to appeal ; and by his judgment, reinforced, as ib will . doubtless be, by that of the archaeologists and men of ecience with whom Germany abounds, the question will, provisionally at least, be settled. We await Professor Virchow's decision with unusual interest, and on grounds which every student of the connection between genius and organisation will readily appreciate. Probably no dramatic poet who ever lived possessed faculties which were so splendid in their proportion and so symmetrically balanced. Will the cranium just unearthed of the writer of the "Antigone" illustrate, so far as cranial structure can illustrate, the symmetry of the mind whose cerebral substratum it enclosed ; or are we to experience yet another disappointment in finding that genius of the most perfect order can enshrine itself in a comparatively narrow and poorly - adjusted tenement ? We should indeed be surprised if this latter result were found to be the oase —knowing, as we do, the overwhelming preponderance of the instances in which mental power has prepared the contemporary world for its expression by the cranial conditions under which it is found. In the library of the University of Edinburgh, for example, the skull of George Buchanan, except for the abnormal thinness of its osseous texture, is all that we might have expected. Again, we have but to recall the fun', that the only hat that would go over the omnium of Robert Burns (amongst a distinguished company who, one by one, made the experiment) was that of Thomas Carlyle—a "fit "that would have been impossible in the lifetime of the poet, with his dark, bushy locks curling round his calvaria. Comparative craniology, indeed, from the fewness of its typical illustrations, labours under disadvantages which are not shared by other departments of comparative science ; and it is this, among other considerations, which quickens expectations and intensifies' interest as to the verdict which is about to be given by Professor Virchow and his assessors on the putative skull of Sophocles.