Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/587

Rh feet 5 inches, Beethoven, who is described as "scarcely over 5 feet 4, Vienna measure," John Keats ("little over 5 feet"), Stephen A. Douglass ("scarcely over 5 feet") and Swinburne and Whistler, whose statures are given as "five feet or so." We should add, however, that the figures as to Swinburne and Whistler, like those with reference to Edward Fitzgerald in an earlier paragraph, were derived not from authoritative biographies, as in the case of all the other names, but from magazine articles which chanced to come under the writer's observation while pursuing these investigations.

As "short" or "under medium height" we find John Quincey Adams, Andrew Carnegie, William Ellery Channing, Chaucer, Alexander Hamilton ("much below"), Ibsen, Charles Lamb, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas B. Macaulay, John Milton, Thomas Moore, Alexander Pope, Robespierre, Savanarola, Wm. H. Seward ("small"), Thoreau, Martin Van Buren, Chopin and Michael Angelo.

The materialist who believes life and personality are but the florescence of physical forces, and the brain not the urn but the creative agent of thought, may rejoice over the fact that of those men of genius who were low in stature no few are expressly mentioned as having had large heads—namely, Stephen A. Douglass, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Lamb, Macaulay, Napoleon and Beethoven. On the other hand, he will be confronted by the fact that a number of tall men of a high order of talent have possessed craniums of proportions not calculated to inspire respect—notably Chief Justice Marshall, Washington, Captain Cook and, in a peculiar degree, the poet Shelley, who shared this characteristic with his fellow minstrels Byron and Keats.

The circumstance is a curious one, if our catalogue of names may be relied upon as a basis for deduction, that naval commanders have been of low stature. The fact that coast-dwellers, unlike mountain-peoples and forest-folk, are usually short in body may not be without a bearing upon this; since sea-faring men are apt to spring from coastd-welling races.

The roll of names and statures which we have given suffers in its usefulness because of the undue predominance of American names. The effect of this is plainly to heighten the average stature. The need of a table of names, sufficiently large to obviate errors from non-essential causes, and carefully sifted so as to exclude men of merely accidental distinction, is a condition which meets the inquirer at the threshold of the subject, and even this table of names would have to be grouped by races and regions, and separately studied, in order that comparisons within each region and nationality might be made.