June 1 — A Question of Skulls
The portrait busts of the Romans were their highest achievements in art. One sees literally thousands of them in Italy, and their painstaking accuracy is obvious. What is to me most interesting is that the sculptured Roman head and face might easily be taken for a portrait of the English people of to-day. In any congregation of the English governing classes will be found constantly reproduced the long, narrow skull, the bold aquiline nose, the stern lips and chin, and that clean fleshless outline of the Roman—resembling the keen modelling of the head of the high-bred horse—repeated so frequently in marble and porphyry in all these museums.
Can it be that Empire reproduces the type? Yet ethnologists trust more to the shape of the skull in the study of race affinities than to any other proof. The modern Italian skull is the extreme opposite in type; is short and broad; so indeed is the skull of all the continental races of Europe. I know that the skull measurements are not supposed to give this result, but to the eye the English alone seem to possess this long, narrow skull.
Amusing also is it to remark that the Roman women were not handsome. In both races the resemblance between the sexes is too strong. The fine, bony, equine type, so admirable in the male Roman and Englishman, becomes hardness in the women, who lack seduction and charm. Also curious to note, there is the same proud grace of costume and coiffure in the men; the same ugliness and lack of taste in the arrangement of the hair and dress of the women of the two races.