Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/634

 626 bones, the powerful lower jaw occupying the most prominent part; indeed, in this respect it contrasts ill with the skulls of several of the lower monkeys, which in general form seem to parody but too closely that of man.





We may see at a glance in these skulls the prominent races of mankind. The small Tatar physiognomy is traced in those prominent high cheek bones, the delicate Hindoo in that small fine skull of most fragile construction. Again, we see the race of narrow foreheads in the Australian and New Guinea skulls. Here and there we find that the skull has been utilised as a water-vessel, a piece of twisted native grass passing through the orbits and the great foramen by way of handle.

The Scandinavians used, it is said, to drink meed out of the skulls of their ancestors; the natives of Western Australia use “the dome of thought” as a calabash in which to carry water. Here is a specimen in which the water has clearly been poured from the eye-holes, as the edges of the bones have been quite polished by the friction of the fluid. The Polynesians have a custom of ornamenting their skulls. Among the collection before us there is one with eyes of wood hideously projecting from the sockets, and with a kind of comical bowsprit running out from the nose. But how comes this high-browed Caucasian skull among those of the lowest type of savages? All the catalogue tells us is that it came from South Australia, the natives of which were known at one time to have been cannibals. There are traces of fire still to be seen upon the temporal bones, and we may draw the dark inference that its owner must have been some European despatched and eaten ages ago. Strange that, through the agencies of science, this grim relic should have made the circuit of the globe to testify to the fact!

The osteological collection, mainly the work of Hunter, from the human skeletons we have been looking at, descends in an unbroken chain down to the lowest insect life. It is curious to contrast the beautifully dissected framework of the minute humming-bird with that of the gigantic dinornis of New Zealand, the imperfect skeleton of which towers above us from its appropriate pedestal. The history of these bones affords a proof of the marvellously prophetical powers of science. Some years ago a few very large bones, found in a New Zealand watercourse, were brought to this country and submitted to the inspection of Professor Owen, then the curator of the museum. After a careful study of their peculiarities, he pronounced them to belong to an extinct wingless bird of gigantic proportions. At the time his scientific friends merely smiled at the poetical flight of the Professor, and attempted to discourage what they considered to be his rashness in building such a superstructure upon a few disjointed bits of bone: he persisted, however, in his opinions, and has lived to find them verified, as whole skeletons of these extraordinary birds have since been found, proving that they belong to that class of which the apteryx in the Zoological Gardens is now the diminutive and sole living representative. There are in the museum some eggs of the dinornis, and casts of those of a still larger species once living in the Island of Madagascar, a section of which would be big enough for a foot-bath.

The curiosities of the museum are the points which principally attract the non-professional visitors, and among these are some singular examples of the desperate injuries the human frame can sustain with comparative impunity. For instance, here is the shaft of a chaise; some fine day in the year 1812, we are informed, it transfixed the chest of a certain Mr. Tipple, entering under the left arm and coming out under the right arm; and, in confirmation of the story, we find in a large bottle close at hand a preparation of the chest bones, integument, and lungs, showing the cicatrices of the old wound and the manner in which the lungs had been injured. Nevertheless, the object of this unpleasant operation lived eleven years afterwards, and drove, for all we know, his tax-cart as jollily as before. In a recess close at hand is a drawing of another