more ungrateful still, and he left the clays of Essex for the lighter lands of Anningsley, near Chertsey, in Surrey. He got more land for his money here than in Essex, and was able to try upon a greater scale several of those doubtful experiments that he had found in foreign and other books, all of which, as might have been expected, ended in no inconsiderable loss of money. With his removal to Surrey ended his close intimacy with Mr. Edgeworth. Henceforward the two saw but little of each other, Day occupying a considerable portion of his time in writing political tracts, such as the Letters of Marius, a Dialogue between the Justice of the Peace and a Farmer, Letters to Arthur Young on the Bill now depending in Parliament to prevent the exportation of wool, &c.; besides fresh children's books, The Grateful Turk, published in a volume of Moral Tales, and The History of Little Jack, The Fatal Effects of Delay, and The History of Philip Quarll, &c. Alas for poor Day! his removal from Stapleford Abbots to Anningsley brought him no good luck. He lost 300l. a year by his experiments, and his new fangled notions as to agriculture brought him into unpleasant relations with his neighbours, who objected to the new plantations on each farm, which formed a leading feature of his schemes. On the 28th of September 1789 Day started to visit his mother at Bear Hill, riding a colt whose education he had conducted according to his own peculiar theories, namely, that kindness, and kindness alone, would control any animal. Likely enough his riding was, like his farming, more theoretical than practical; the colt shied at some one winnowing corn by the roadside, plunged, and threw him on his head. He had concussion of the brain, never spoke after his fall, and died in three-quarters of an hour. In 1780 a will had been made by Day leaving everything to his wife and appointing her sole executrix. This will the widow had reason to suppose had been superseded by a later one, in which Keir and Edgeworth had been appointed executors. The deceased had frequently spoken of such a one, and apparently explained its advantages, but when Mrs. Day's nephew came to go over the papers no later testament than the first could be found, and a sum of twenty thousand pounds was also missing. At the time of the American war, fearing a national bankruptcy, Day, with the cognisance and assistance of Edgeworth, had buried a considerable sum under the floor of the study at Bear Hill, his mother's house; but this amount Mrs. Phillips declared had been taken up again and deposited in the public funds, so that it is probable that the money must have been spent in that rather indiscriminate charity that Day is known to have practised, though he condemns the habit in his later letters. He was buried in Wargrave Churchyard, and an epitaph that he had himself composed for Doctor Small was placed upon the stone. Beyond the reach of time, or fortune's power, Remain, cold stone, remain, and mark the hour Oh! taught on reason's boldest wings to rise M. LOCKWOOD. GENIUS AND STATURE THE anthropometry of' genius '-using the word here and throughout merely to indicate the most highly valued variations of intellectual faculty—is in a much more elementary condition than our knowledge of the physical characters of criminals. There are sufficient reasons why this should be so. The man of genius less obviously belongs to the dangerous classes' than the criminal, the idiot, and other varieties of abnormal man; so that we seldom obtain him under favourable conditions for precise measurement. Moreover, persons of artistic genius, at all events, usually possess to an even greater extent than criminals a kind of vanity distinctly opposed to all such proceedings; and no one has yet been found to imitate M. Zola, who complacently lent himself to the minute scientific investigations of Dr. Toulouse. If, however, there is one anthropological character of genius which ought to be fairly well ascertained, it is stature; for that is the coarsest of all anthropometric characters, and in its roughest degrees can be judged by the unaided eye. This is so obvious that from time to time the subject has been discussed; but, so far from any agreement having been reached, the conclusions of those who have dealt with the matter are absolutely opposed. And the reflection is inevitable that, if so simple a question as this will not admit of solution, it is impossible to determine any character of genius; and any attempt to consider the study of genius a scientific study is merely an affectation of pseudo-scientific journalists. When, however, we come to look into the attempts made to settle this question, the cause of their failure is sufficiently obvious. The apparent simplicity of the problem has put the inquirer off his guard. In such a matter it has seemed enough to collect anecdotes concerning little or big 'great men,' to look into a few histories and biographies, or to fall back on one's own reminiscences. No one has attempted to treat the matter in a really serious and methodical manner. So far as I am aware, not a single writer who has undertaken to inquire whether men of genius are 'tall' or 'short' has taken the trouble to explain what he means by 'tall' or 'short.' It is easy to understand the contempt which anyone with the faintest tincture of scientific training must feel for such inquiries. The study of the stature of famous men threatens to resolve itself largely into a psychological analysis of the fallacies of human perception. Men are wont to belittle the physical height of the man of genius in order to emphasise his intellectual stature; or they magnify the Jovian altitude of both. Moreover, we all have different standards of height; and it is possible for the same person to be short, middlesized, and tall, for different observers who all knew him well at the same period of his life. Middle height, as judged by the eye, is a peculiarly uncertain quantity. Thus Rossetti seemed to his brother to be of rather low middle stature;' to Mr. Hall Caine, of full middle height'; and to Mr. Sharp, rather over middle height.' Hisactual height was barely 5 feet 8 inches; so that, considered as an Englishman, he was of precisely middle height, though to most persons he would appear somewhat below it, since we instinctively and reasonably compare a man with his own class, and the professional classes are somewhat above the general average in height. This is, indeed, a very frequent source of error, and a large number of persons of genius who have been called short must, it is probable, strictly be regarded as of middle height, or even as tall. It is scarcely credible, but seems to be true, that of the numerous writers who have come forward to settle this question, not one has taken the medium-sized 'great' man into consideration, and not one has considered what proportion of tall, medium-sized, and short men are found in the community generally. Yet, until we know these facts, it is idle to pile up lists of either short or tall men of genius. I propose to try to avoid some of the grosser of the fallacies just mentioned. We may fairly attempt to approach the problem on a British basis, because, although British stature is slightly higher than that most prevalent in Europe, it is fairly near the average; and, moreover, I shall chiefly be concerned with British men of genius.' Thanks to the Anthropometric Committee of the British Association, the stature of the inhabitants of the British Islands is fairly well. ascertained. The average for the United Kingdom (I speak throughout of males only) is 67.66 inches, while the mean (i.e. the most frequent) height is 5 feet 7-8 inches, the professional and commercial classes having a mean height about 2-3 inches over this, and the labouring classes about an inch or two below; racially both the Scotch and the Irish are somewhat taller than the English, and the Welsh shorter. When we examine the Anthropometric Committee's tables, we find that not less than 68 per cent. of the inhabitants of 1 Stature is one of those measurements which may be investigated with excess of precision. There are still investigators who laboriously carry out extended inquiries into height measured by millimetres, while quite unaware that the daily variation in height, especially in youth, is so gross as to be itself measurable in centimetres. In a boyish attempt of my own to be scientifically exact I discovered this daily variation; but it had been carefully investigated a very long time before by a clergyman named Wasse (Philosophical Transactions, 1724), who correctly attributed it to the elasticity of the intervertebral cartilages of the spine. these islands are between 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 9 inches in height; while 16 per cent. are below 5 feet 4 inches and 16 per cent. above 5 feet 9 inches. It is, therefore, both convenient and sufficiently accurate to say that all persons between 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 9 inches are of medium height. There is thus very little variability in the stature of the inhabitants generally. As Mr. Galton has pointed out, one-half of the population differs less than 1.7 inch from the average of all of them, while not less than 68 per cent. come within what I have called medium height. Therefore if stature counts for nothing in men of extraordinary intellectual ability, or 'genius,' and assuming for the present that such men spring from the population generally, we must expect to find that 68 per cent. of such persons are of medium stature (not above 5 feet 9 inches, nor below 5 feet 4 inches); while small, but equal, numbers should be found below and above that height, forming a symmetrical curve. There are, of course, several possibilities. Instead of this normal convex curve, we might have an oblique downward curve (due to a preponderance of tall persons), or an oblique upward curve (due to a preponderance of short persons), or a concave curve (due to a preponderance of both tall and short persons). The first possibility, i.e. that the majority of men of genius like the majority of ordinary men are of medium height-although apparently the most obvious assumption—has not, so far as I know, ever been advanced. No one has yet brought forward a list of average-sized men of genius, and argued that they form the majority. The second possibility has aroused most enthusiastic faith; the advocates of the theory that men of genius are short of stature have shown a fiery activity often characteristic of their clients, and have sometimes claimed celebrities to whom they are not entitled. The third type has found numerous, though less energetic, champions. The fourth type, according to which the short and tall would alike prevail at the expense of the middle-sized, seems to have found no advocate. Yet, as we shall see, it is this type which most nearly represents the state of things we actually find. The names and measurements contained in the following lists have been drawn from many sources, and, although I am prepared to learn that some have been mistakenly entered, I believe that in the main they may be relied upon as accurate. Many names given in previous lists have been excluded, either because the evidence seemed feeble, or the intellectual ability displayed trifling. I have thus exercised a certain degree of selection; that is inevitable when the value of evidence has to be sifted. But such selection has no disturbing influence on the results when it is not exercised in favour of a prejudice; and I must admit that, though the result I have reached seems to me the most simple and the most probable result, it had not occurred to me beforehand as probable. So far as I had any |