ful in its tone, was never finished. Darwin was writing as he was seized with what seemed a fainting fit, and he died within an hour. Miss Edgeworth writes of the shock her father felt when the sad news reached him; a shock, she says, which must in some degree be experienced by every person who reads this letter of Dr. Darwin's. Dr. No wonder this generous outspoken man was esteemed in his own time. To us, in ours, it has been given still more to know the noble son of "that giant brood," whose name will be loved and held in honor as long as people live to honor nobleness, simplicity, and genius; those things which give life to life itself.-Cornhill Magazine. SHAKESPEARE ON DEATH. THERE are in Shakespeare's Plays about ninety deaths, taking place either on the stage or immediately behind the scenes, so that the tidings are told or evidence is given directly after the fact. Twenty-five occur in this latter manner, but not at all for the classical reason that terrible sights were not to be represented before the people. In many cases, gory heads are introduced, far more ghastly than a whole murdered body; the plight of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus is proof that an Elizabethan audience was content to sup full of horrors, and the many battle-fields in the Historical Plays may well be supposed to have included representations of the dead and dying. The number above given is only that of named, and therefore important, personages; it might be increased by soldiers and attendants who are killed, as it were, by the way. The modes of death are very various, and yet not quite all which we might naturally anticipate. Cold steel, the dagger or the sword, accounts for about two thirds of the whole; twelve persons die from old age or natural decay, in some cases hastened by the trying circumstances of their lives; seven are beheaded; five die by poison, including the elder Hamlet, whose symptoms are so minutely described by his Ghost; two by suffocation, unless, indeed, Desdemona makes a third; two by strangling; one from a fall, one is drowned, three die by snake-bite; and one, Horner, the armorer, is thumped to death with a sand-bag. The modes of death of which we might have expected Shakespeare to speak are arrow and gun-shot wounds. The English Archers are said to have done so much execution in more than one battle of which we hear in the plays, that it is curious they are only twice named as employed in fight: "Arrows fled not swifter toward their aim, Than did our soldiers aiming at their safety Fly from the field," at the battle of Shrewsbury; and Richard, at Bosworth, cries, Draw, archers, draw your arrows to the head!" It may be, of course, that a flight of arrows was a difficult and, indeed, a risky thing to represent on a stage; but this would scarce account for no mention of death by them, and it is probable that by Elizabeth's day the use of bow and arrow had so passed from reality into play, that it only occurred to the poet now and then, as adding a certain picturesque detail to his words. He makes the Archbishop of Canterbury, when counselling the too ready Henry V. to invade France, speak only of the pastime of archery : As many arrows loosed several ways The other allusions are merely metaphor, as Cupid's arrows, and : The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.' Guns were still only pieces of heavy ordinance, and though Falstaff speaks of a bullet's swiftness, he is thinking of what we call a ball, probably of stone; and Shakespeare uses all words connected with explosive artillery simply in relation to the battering of walls, and not to the death and wounding of men. Not till the English civil wars did firearms play any considerable part in personal slaughter. It may be interesting to examine how Shakespeare has dealt with death by these various means, and how far his description tallies with observed scientific facts. In Arthur's fall from the tower and Horner's death, the physical causes were the same; whatever the outward injuries, death resulted from failure of the heart's action, in consequence of some serious internal lesion, not from fracture of the spine, for in both after the injury is given there is time for one, yet but for one, short speech, and the end when it comes is instantaneous. "Hold, Peter, hold, I confess treason!" cries Horner, and is going to say more; there is no apparent failure of power, but he dies at once, abruptly. There is nothing to be said of the cases of suffocation, since they are transacted off the stage, and no physical signs are described; nor, for the same reason, of the various instances of beheading. The single case of drowning is beautifully divested of all violence, and that which might be so painful is rendered peaceful. Ophelia, having lost her reason, is unaware of her danger; she is buoyed up at first by her garments, and then, as they grow heavy, she is dragged down by them gently and gradually, so that there is no room for struggle, and the waters close over her almost without a ripple. Who that ever saw Mr. Millais' early picture on the subject can possibly forget it, or fail to recognize that poet and painter had equally rendered the fact, and yet divested it of its most terrible elements? In the deaths of Cleopatra and her maids, Shakespeare would seem to have been for once at fault. We say her maids, because the only way to account for the sudden death of Iras is to suppose that she had met and touched the incoming basket of asps, on leaving the presence to fetch her mistress's robe and crown. But, however this may be, Cleopatra and Charmian die almost instantaneously of the snake's bite, after the Queen" applies " the serpents to her breast and arm, as though they were leeches. "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?" The poet was quite aware that he must make the effect of the asp very different to that of the viper's, which now and then might lame a horse, or, very exceptionally, kill a keeper, after some But hours suffering, in his own Arden. there was no one to tell him the mode of death from the bites of Eastern serpents; his imagination is quite unfettered, and with true poetic feeling, he makes the poison swifter than the cobra's, yet peaceful and painless. It were better he should not know or tell the agonies and the distortion which, in fact, must have marred the beauty of Egypt's Queen. What is there lacking in accuracy is more than made up in the account of Gloucester's death by strangling. There has been a terrible struggle, and every physical sign is intensified: "See how the blood is settled in his face. His face is black and full of blood, His hands abroad displayed." Of the deaths by poisoning, two are minutely described. One takes place off the stage, and is only named to us; two are sudden, the Queen in Hamlet, In these last cases, the and Romeo. agent was clearly hydrocyanic acid in some form, a vegetable extract, such as laurel-water, killing almost at once, and painlessly, leaving no time for thought, but only for the certainty of quick-coming death. King John, on the other hand, is poisoned by a corrosive irritant, probably mineral, comparatively slow in its action, of which burning heat is the chief symptom: "There is so hot a summer in my bosom, Do I shrink up? To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips?" would so course through the body, is not clear. It is probable that he took the old story, so far as he needed to do so, but having made it responsible for the mode in which the foreign element was introduced into Hamlet's frame, used then his own observation and curious plant-lore for the efforts which the body made to cast it out. a grave; but he felt them not, and when, by the streams of blood, he found himself marked for pain, he refused to consider then what he was to feel tomorrow; but when his rage had cooled into the temper of a man, and clammy moisture had checked the fiery emission of spirits, he wonders at his own boldness, and blames his fate, and needs a mighty patience to bear his great calamity." The many cases of death by steel are very closely studied from nature. Those who have carefully examined the Shakespeare carefully discriminates dead on a battle-field, or in the streets between the wounds which pierce the after an émeute, are struck with the fact heart and are at once fatal, and those that while the expression on the faces of which allow a few minutes, or even those who have died by gunshot wounds moments, of life. A stab which causes is one of agony and distress, the dead instant death wrings from the dying perby sword have a calmer expression, son one sharp cry of momentary agony, though their wounds often seem more or sometimes purely spasmodic and painful to the eye. A very careful mechanical, and then all is silent; and observer, who was through the Indian with the cry there is a sharp, convulsive Mutiny, entirely confirms this. After movement of the limbs. So, Polonius giving several instances, he says, "A utters one loud "O! I am slain !" rapid death by steel is almost painless. Aaron imitates the squeal of the dying Sabre edge or point divides the nerves nurse, Weke, weke !" Prince Edward, so quickly as to give little pain. A bul- in Richard III., sprawls,' after his let lacerates." This is in entire ac- first stab. Those who do not die at cordance with Shakespeare's diagnosis. once, but bleed to death, or are choked York, in Henry IV., dies "smiling; smiling;" in blood, speak a little, know they are so young Talbot in Henry VI., 1, dying, but are not in pain, and have no "Poor boy! he smiles.". In the great convulsive movements. majority of cases, there appears to have been no acute pain; and such distressful sensations as were felt, when there was time to feel anything, were those of cold. Death, therefore, resulted from hæmorrhage, of which an exceeding chilliness, without pain, is always the consequence. Hotspur and Warwick both speak of this chill, the earthly and cold hand of death," the "cold, congealed blood." The only instances in which acute pain wrung groans from the sufferer were those in which death was long delayed, when, as with Clifford," the air has got into my deadly wounds; and Montague also groans from the delay. There is a most striking passage in Jeremy Taylor's sermons in which he speaks of wounds to the same effect, but attributes the painlessness of a wound at first, wrongly as it would seem, only to the heat and rage of the fighter, who has no time to feel. "I have known a bold trooper fight in the confusion of a battle, and, being warm with heat and rage, received from the swords of his enemy wounds open as We now come to the deaths of old age and by natural causes, and of these there are comparatively few. Comedy puts away from it the idea of death altogether; and great tragedies are, as a rule, concerned with violent ends, Yet here, where there is little seeming variety, Shakespeare's observation has anticipated that of modern skill. Miss Nightingale has pointed out how constantly the mental state of the dying depends on their physical conditions. As a rule, she tells us, in acute cases interest in their own danger is rarely felt. "Indifference, excepting with regard to bodily suffering, or to some duty the dying man desires to perform, is the far more usual state. But patients who die of consumption very frequently die in a state of seraphic joy and peace; the countenance almost expresses rapture. Patients who die of cholera, peritonitis, etc., on the contrary, often die in a state approaching despair. In dysentery, diarrhoea, or fever, the patient often dies in a state of indifference." Now, in Shakespeare, the majority feel indifference or calm acquiescence; Gaunt "plays nicely " with his name; Henry IV. has no thought of the future, but only some faint interest still in the things of life; Mortimer cares only for his funeral; Bedford is acquiescent, neither hopeful nor fearful, Now, quiet soul, depart when Heaven please. There are a few exceptions, and they exemplify with force what Miss Nightingale has laid down. Queen Katherine, dying of long decline, has visions of eternal peace; while Beaufort, whose faculties are about him to the last, has the most vivid and keen remorse for murder, the only crime which the sin ner, as a rule, seems unable to forget. In Shakespeare, again, those who in perfect health know or believe they are to die take the conviction according to their physical temperaments, not accord ing to their lives. If there be seeming exceptions, it is because some foreign conditions are introduced, as when Richard is visited with terrible dreams, and something like craven terror as the result of them. But he has been drinking heavily before he goes to rest, and recovers himself in the morning before and in the battle. As an instance of a contrast between two physical temperaments, we may take the terror of the sensitive Claudio, so full of young life and vigor, and the stolid indifference of the brutal Barnadine. Of course, this whole subject is capable of being worked out in much greater detail, but as in a former paper, it has seemed worth while giving a few hints for study, founded on what has occurred to the present writer while reading Shakespeare through, under somewhat unusual conditions.-The Spectator. OUR ORIGIN AS A SPECIES. THERE seems to be a manifest desire in some quarters to anticipate the looked-for and, by some, hoped-for, proofs of our descent-or rather ascent-from the ape. 66 66 summed up, so far, at least, as a portion or "fragment" of the skull might show them. What is posed as the Neanderthal skull" is the roof of the braincase, or calvarium" of the anatomist, In the September issue of the Fort- including the pent-house overhanging nightly Review a writer cites, in this rela- the eye-holes or "orbits. There is no tion, the Neanderthal skull, which other part of the fragment which can be possesses large bosses on the forehead, supposed to be meant by the "large strikingly suggestive of those which give bosses" of the above quotation. And, the gorilla its peculiarly fierce appear- on this assumption, I have to state that ance;" and, he proceeds: "No other the superorbital ridge in the calvarium human skull presents so utterly bestial in question is but little more prominent a type as the Neanderthal fragment. If than in certain human skulls of both one cuts a female gorilla-skull in the higher and lower races, and of both the same fashion the resemblance is truly as- existing and cave-dwelling periods. It tonishing, and we may say that the only is a variable cranial character by no human feature in the skull is its size."* means indicative of race, but rather of In testing the question as between. Linnæus and Cuvier of the zoological value of the differences between lowest man and highest ape, a naturalist would not limit his comparison of a portion of the human skull with the corresponding one of a female ape, but would extend it to the young or immature gorilla, and also to the adult male; he would then find the generic and specific characters sex. Limiting the comparison to that on which the writer quoted bases his conclusions-apparently the superficial extent of the roof-plate-its greater extent as compared with that of a gorilla equalling, probably, in weight the entire frame of the individual from the Neanderthal cave, is strongly significant of the superiority of size of brain in the cave-dweller. The inner surface moreover indicates the more complex charac ter of the soft organ on which it was moulded; the precious gray substance" being multiplied by certain convolutions which are absent in the apes. But there is another surface which the unbiassed zoologist finds it requisite to compare. In the human "calvarium" in question, the mid-line traced backward from the super-orbital ridge runs along a smooth tract. In the gorilla a ridge is raised from along the major part of that tract to increase the surface giving attachment to the biting muscles. Such ridge in this position varies only in height in the female and the male adult ape, as the specimens in the British Museum demonstrate. In the Neanderthal individual, as in the rest of mankind, the corresponding muscles do not extend their origins to the upper surface of the cranium, but stop short at the sides forming the inner wall or boundary of what are called the "temples," defined by Johnson as the "upper part of the sides of the head," whence our biting muscles" are called "temporal," as the side-bones of the skull to which they are attached are also the "temporal bones." In the superficial comparison to which Mr. Grant Allen has restricted himself, in bearing testimony on a question which perhaps affects our fellow-creatures, in the right sense of the term, more warmly than any other in human and comparative anatomy, the obvious difference just pointed out ought not to have been passed over. It was the more incumbent on one pronouncing on the paramount problem, because the "sagittal ridge in the gorilla," as in the orang, relates to and signifies the dental character which differentiates all Quadrumana from all Bimana that have ever come under the ken of the biologist. And this ridge much more "strikingly suggests" the fierceness of the powerful brute-ape than the part referred to as "large bosses." Frontal prominences, more truly so termed, are even better developed in peaceful, timid, graminivorous quadrupeds than in the skulls of man or of ape. But before noticing the evidence which the teeth bear on the physical relation of man to brute, 1 would premise that the comparison must not be limited to a part or fragment" of the bony frame, but to its totality, as relating to the modes and faculties of locomotion. Beginning with the skull-and, indeed, for present aim, limiting myself thereto-I have found that a vertical longitudinal section brings to light in greatest number and of truest value the differential characters between lowest Homo and highest Simia. Those truly and indifferently interested in the question may not think it unworthy their time-if it has not already been so bestowed-to give attention to the detailed discussions and illustrations of the characters in question in the second and third volumes of the "Transactions of the Zoological Society. The concluding Memoir, relating more especially to points of approximation in cranial and dental structure of the highest Quadrumane to the lowest Bimane, has been separately published. I selected from the large and instructive series of human skulls of various races in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons that which was the lowest, and might be called most bestial, in its cranial and dental characters. It was from an adult of that human family of which the life characters are briefly but truly and suggestively defined in the narrative of Cook's first voyage in the "Endeavor."t Not to trespass further on the patience of my readers, I may refer to the "Memoir on the Gorilla, 4to, 1865. Plate XII. gives a view, natural size, of the vertical and longitudinal section of an Australian skull; Plate XI. gives a similar view of the skull of the gorilla. Reduced copies of these views may be found at p. 572, figs. 395, 396, vol. ii, of my "Anatomy of Vertebrates." As far as my experience has reached, there is no skull displaying the characters of a Quadrumanous species, as that series descends from the gorilla and chimpanzee to the baboon, which exhibits differences, osteal or dental, on * Osteological Contributions to the Natural History of the Orangs (Pithecus) and Chimpanzees (Troglodites niger and Trog. Gorilla)." + Hawkesworth's 4th ed., vol. iii. 1770, pp. S6, 137, 229. The skull in question is No. 5394 of the " Catalogue of the Osteology in the above Museum, 4to, vol. ii. p. 823 (1853). |