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"Yes," said Max, whose uneasy look ill agreed with his words and manner, "see what it is to be blessed with a tough cranium; such a whack would have crushed mine like an egg-shell; but it has only enlarged your bump of reverence a little."
Coming to the benighted country, then, with all the gathered wisdom of Edinburgh in his gallinaceous cranium, and what he counted a vast experience of worldly affairs besides, he brought with him also the firm resolve to be the death of superstition, at least upon his own property.
"The cranium is of unusual size, and of a long elliptical form.
"I do," said Mr Cranium; "because I know that the farinaceous qualities of the potato will tend to preserve the great requisites of unity and coalescence in the various constituent portions of my animal republic; and that the hemlock, if gathered by mistake for parsley, chopped up small with butter, and eaten with a boiled chicken, would necessitate a great derangement, and perhaps a total decomposition, of my corporeal mechanism."
When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld. Mr. Busk, after giving a translation of Professor Schaaffhausen's memoir in the "Natural History Review," added some valuable comments of his own on the characters in which this skull approached that of the gorilla and chimpanzee.
The summit of the head rises in a longitudinal ridge in the direction of the sagittal suture; so that from the sagittal suture to that portion of the cranium where the diameter is greatest the head slopes like the roof of a house.
He was the usual bundle of bones and blue cotton rags, and his gunny bags flapped on his stick legs like banners. He looked as uncertain as a candle-flame in a draught. Perhaps he was sixteen. I dunno. Maybe he was sixty. You can't tell these Johnnies. He had a shaven cranium, and his tight scalp might have been slipped over the bony bosses of his head with a shoehorn.
He presented all the appearances except the dilation of the pupil of the eye of one whose brain had been concussed by a deep fall, or laboured under a fracture of the bones of the cranium.
The iron bar, together with a cast of the patient's head, was placed in the Museum of the Massachusetts Medical College. Bigelow appends an engraving to his paper. In the illustration the parts are as follows: Lateral view of a prepared cranium representing the iron bar traversing its cavity. Front view of same. Plan of the base seen from within.
Deville, a noted professor of the art called phrenology, who felt his head, carefully measuring all its bumps, and, having learnt Clare's name, informed him that he possessed all the swellings necessary to make verses. This so delighted 'Rip, that he insisted on getting a cast of his friend's cranium.
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