A strange uneasiness seems to have possessed the bones of many of the great composers. Mozart’s skull is said to be in the possession of Prof. Hyrtl, the famous anatomist of Vienna, who proposes to bequeath it to the Mozarteum at Salzburg. Mozart, like Schiller, was buried by an impoverished family in a grave unmarked save by a musical grave-digger, who secured the head—according to what seems to be very vague tradition—ten years later, and kept it, so long as he himself lived, in a cupboard in his humble lodgings in the precincts of the Cemetery of St. Marx. From him it passed to a second grave-digger, also musical, from whom it came into the possession of the Hyrtls. Those who have examined it, however, say that it has none of the peculiarities which, according to the existing theories of phrenology, should mark the presence of musical genius. And these peculiarities, strangely enough, are said to have been lacking in the skulls of Haydn, Schubert, and Beethoven, each of which, like the skulls of Mozart and Schiller and of Shakspere’s Yorick, had a tongue in it, and could sing once; and each seems to have been knocked about the mazzard with a sexton’s spade, and to have been used to point a moral, and, perhaps, even to stop a bunghole. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: FREDERICK SCHILLER] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Haydn’s skull, it may be mentioned, is believed to be in the possession of the family of an eminent physician in Vienna. The rest of his body, originally buried in Hundsthurn church-yard, now lies in the parish church of Eisenstadt. Beethoven’s bones seem to have been disturbed but twice. His grave, in the Währing Cemetery at Vienna, having become almost uninhabitable from long neglect, he was reburied in the same spot in 1863; and in 1888 he was removed to the Central Cemetery of Vienna. Beethoven’s head is described, by those who knew him in life, as having been uncommonly large. His forehead was high and expanded. His eyes, when he laughed, seemed to sink into his head, although they were distended to an unusual degree when one of his musical ideas took possession of his mind. His mouth was well-formed; his under-lip protruded a little; his nose was rather broad. According to one authority “his skull [at the time of the exhumation in 1863] was discovered to be very compact throughout, and about an inch thick;” according to another authority it was “a small skull, and might have been supposed to belong to a man of restricted intellect, rather than to a genius like the great master.”