The skull: From relic of identity to artifact of science

“ THE human interest in the past never dies, its hold upon us increases with the growing years, and every gain that is made to the store of knowledge does but add to the zest with which we search for more; nation vies with nation for the glory of recovering relics of life that are strewn along the path of death.
From the sands and from the tombs, from the paintings and the graven tablets, and from the faces of the rocks we rehabilitate the vision of the mighty dead ”

“ The brain and the crumbs of earth are inseparably wedded. Come with us, skull. You look scholarly, and shall lie upon our desk,—a solemn epistle to the living. But the cave is filled with the vile smoke of our torch, and we are choked with the heat and dust. ”

“ Human history is a great tragedy indeed. But, like all tragedies, it has its spiritualizing, sanctifying, ennobling side. When the drama of the ages is unrolled we see much to make us weep; but we also see immeasurably more to make us glory that we are a part of the race. ”

“ But written history often becomes shot-riddled by criticism and is set away, at last, like battle-flags, after many honorable campaigns, in some museums of relics or some temple of fame. Unless such trophies continue to awaken in the living present a sort of enthusiasm and a sense of unity with the past experience of our race, then are our historic standards but antiquarian rubbish, indeed, as useless and unmeaning as the banners and symbols of heraldry.
The subject of History is the self-conscious development of the human race, the Ego of Humanity. ”

“ The body is in the first instance buried in a squatting attitude, one arm resting on the knee and the head supported by one of the hands. Then, when nothing remains except the bare bones, the skull is removed — that is, if it belonged to the head of a family or to his principal wife — and transferred to the shelter of a wide-branching dracoeua, which it is henceforth charged to protect against the evil spirits. ”

“ Side by side with this ancestor-worship there goes a simpler skull-cult, by which a man carries about the head of a beloved son or wife, as a dear remembrance of the departed. Among a flourishing population it would naturally be impossible to obtain such objects, but here, where the people are rapidly decreasing in number, a statue often enough loses its descendants, whereupon others have no objection to sell it. ”

“ Bodies have been dug up, and human bones carried off as trophies. The skull of a gallant Massachusetts soldier has been converted into the drinking-cup of a Georgia colonel, that he may, far away among his slaves, renew the festive barbarism of another age under the name of “The Feast of Skulls.”
It is obvious, Sir, that we are now in conflict with beings who belong to a different plane of civilization from ourselves, and it is important that this unquestionable [Pg 302] fact should be made known to the country and to the world. ”

“ It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage.
The case of the Neanderthal skull is very different. Under whatever aspect we view this cranium, whether we regard its vertical depression, the enormous thickness of its supraciliary ridges, its sloped occiput, or its long and straight squamosal suture, we meet with ape-like characters, stamping it as the most pithecoid of human crania yet discovered. ”

“ As the examples, more or less analogous to that of Shakespeare, which I am about to adduce, concern great men who were born and were buried within the limits of our island, I will preface them by giving the very extraordinary cases of Schiller and Raphael, which illustrate both classes: those in which the object of the exhumation was to give the remains a more honourable sepulture, and those in which it was purely to resolve certain questions affecting the skull of the deceased. ”

“ But if, on making a thorough search, no skull be found, I shall believe that it has been stolen: for, apart from the fact of its non-discovery, I should almost be disposed to say, that no superstition, or fear of Shakespeare’s curse, nor any official precaution and vigilance, could have been a match for that combination of curiosity, cupidity, and relic-worship, which has so often prompted and carried out the exhumation of a great man’s bones. ”

“ There must always, however, remain a doubt as to the nature of this ancestral Tertiary man, until actual skulls and skeletons have been found, under circumstances which preclude doubt, and in sufficient numbers to enable anthropologists to speak with the same confidence as to types and races, as they can of his Quaternary successors. This again is difficult from the rarity of such remains, and from the fact that after burial of the dead was introduced, graves must often have been dug down from the surface into older strata, with which in course of time their contents become intermixed. ”

“ Should the body be that of a rich man, or of the relative of one of the village chiefs, the skull is removed to the house, and placed in a conspicuous spot, as I have before mentioned. If, on the other hand, the body is that of a poor man, the remains are thrown together into a cleft in a rock, or some such place, as soon as the coffin has decayed. The bodies of malefactors are buried at once, without anything being erected to mark the place of interment. The remains of human beings are never to be seen scattered about, and it is extremely difficult to obtain a skull from the natives. ”

“ A person who had been trepanned comes to die—one or more pieces are cut from his sacred cranium for amulets or relics; but, inasmuch as the man could not live in another world with a mutilated skull, another piece of skull is given him to make him whole, when he reaches the abode of the blest.—La Nature. ”

“ The lips have rotted away, the nose has decayed, the eyes are blocked up, the colour of the face has changed, and it is impossible to recognize any one of them ; because all bodies turn into dust in the tomb, and they perish, and nothing of them remains to us.
Now it is impossible to identify a bone, and to make it to rejoin the body to which it belonged, because the bone has become bare, and there is no flesh on it. And besides this, even before the flesh which clothed the bone crumbled away it would have been impossible for you to show clearly to whom it belonged. ”

“ But, when all is said, it offends our senses, shocks our memory, daunts our courage, whereas it would be so easy for us to avoid the hateful test. Purified by fire, the memory lives in the heights as a beautiful idea; and death is naught but an immortal birth cradled in flames. This has been well understood by the wisest and happiest nations in history. What happens in our graves poisons our thoughts together with our bodies. The [Pg 28] figure of death, in the imagination of men, depends before all upon the form of burial ”

“ Some will have a dead man's skull stand by them, in their studies or chambers, as an antidote against pride. But God hath fastened us yet closer to mortality: death dwelleth in our bowels. We are apt to marvel that so noble a soul should be lodged in so mean a body, made of the earth to which it must return! [236] A stone is durable and clean; but my flesh is corruptible, and must turn to loathsome filth and rottenness. A marble pillar will stand firm and beautiful from age to age, but I must perish and consume in darkness. ”

“ Every day robs you of treasure. Every hour passes you over to insignificance; and at the end stands Death. The bare and desolate decline drops suddenly into the hopeless, dreadful grave, the black and yawning grave, the foul and loathsome grave. ”

“ All the remains are certainly anthropoid, and if any of them are human, the antiquity of man extends back into the Tertiary, and his affinities with the higher apes become much nearer than has hitherto been supposed. One thing is certain: the discovery of Pithecanthropus is an event of the first importance to the scientific world. ”

“ It is so very rare an instance to meet in fossile remains with a real human bone, skull, jaw-bone or entire human skeleton (as in one particular instance was found enclosed in a lime-stone, mixed with some few utensils and instruments of the primitive world, such as a stone-knife, a copper axe, an iron club, and a dagger of a very ancient form, together with some human bones) ; that the very rareness of the exception serves only to confirm the general rule. ”

“ Unquestionably ancient as these remains are,—the bones are completely fossilized,—they contained lamentably few "primitive characteristics," and hence have not been exploited in the interest of the evolutionary theory. A fragment of skull, a tooth, a thigh-bone, offer much more inviting fields to the evolutionists, since they permit his imagination to range without the restraint of fact. The Oldoway fossil, which is in every essential respect a normal human skeleton, possesses no special attractions for those who would represent man as a descendant of brutish ancestors. ”

“ It is never safe to rely on the antiquity of skulls and skeletons found in association with palæolithic implements and extinct animals, unless the exploration has been made with the greatest care by some well-known scientific observer, or the circumstances of the case are such as to preclude the possibility of later interments. 333 Thus in the famous cavern of Aurignac there is no doubt that it had been long a palæolithic station, and that many of the human remains date back to this period ”

“ In a recess of the, of old, inhabited cave, at a depth of 5 feet 2 inches from the upper surface of the stalagmite, and in a block of stalagmitic breccia of stony hardness, a second human skull, mutilated in the labour of detachment of the matrix, was discovered with other parts of a human skeleton [16] . At every foot of depth of the breccia of the cavern were found scattered implements of flint and bone—the latter chiefly supplied by antlers of reindeer (Cervus tarandus) . ”

“ In reviewing the various incidents connected with the foregoing cases of exhumation one is perhaps most struck with the last two. That an illustrious man of science, and his son, who at that time must already have been a scientific naturalist, should have coöperated in so stupendous a blunder as the mere inspection of Ben Jonson’s skull, without taking so much as a measurement or drawing of it, would be incredible, but for the fact that both are dead, and nothing of the sort has come to light: and it is scarcely less surprising that the Swedenborgians, p. ”

“ All the bones of the skeleton are solid, thick, and indicate a powerful people.
In the valley of the Vézère within a distance of seven or eight miles there have been found eight settlements of this race. I will not detain you to enumerate these or describe them separately. Suffice it to say that, while the remains are all undoubtedly of the same race, the associated animal and archæological remains indicate clearly that they are not of the same age, but rather those of successive periods of development; thus the eight settlements give, as it were, an epitomized history of the race. ”

“ The little piece of bone of a fractured skull that, pressing upon the brain, stupefies the mind, at the same time damages the soul; the congestion or inflammation of the brain that converts a man of giant intellect into a maniac or a dement beyond the hope of cure, also irreparably ruins the soul, which, we are told, never dies, and which, if it exists, is doubtless far removed from the influence of bodily diseases or injuries. ”

“ When it enters on the occupation of a human body, the soul lends to the cerebral matter, which is the seat of thought, a certain modification, a predominance in harmony with the faculties which that soul possesses at the period of its birth, and which it has acquired in an anterior animal or human existence. The brain is moulded by the soul into conformity with its proper aptitudes, its acquired faculties; then the bony covering of the skull, which moulds itself upon the cerebral substance within its cavity, reproduces and gives expression to our predominant faculties. ”