The earliest masks in the collection to-day are replicas of those of Dante, made, perhaps, in the first part of the fourteenth century, and of Tasso, certainly made at the end of the sixteenth. The latest mask is that of Edwin Booth, who died only a few months ago. They range from Sir Isaac Newton, the wisest of men, to Sambo, the lowest type of the American negro; from Oliver Cromwell to Henry Clay; from Bonaparte to Grant; from Keats to Leopardi; from Pius IX. to Thomas Paine; from Ben Caunt, the prize-fighter, to Thomas Chalmers, the light of the Scottish pulpit. So far as I have been able to discover, mine is the most nearly complete and the largest collection of its kind in the world. I have, indeed, found nothing anywhere to compare with it. Usually, the Phrenological Museums contain casts of idiots, criminals, and monstrosities, and these are seemingly gathered together to illustrate what man’s cranial structure ought not to be. There are but three or four casts of the faces of distinguished persons in the British Museum, and about as many in the National Portrait Gallery in London; and all of these I am able to present here, with the exception of that of James II., who belongs, perhaps, to the criminal class. In the Hohenzollern Museum are many casts, but these generally are those of civic or national celebrities—Berlin aldermen or German warriors, in whom the world at large has but little interest. The casts of Frederick the Great, Queen Louise, Schiller, and one or two more in that institution, however, I was permitted to have reproduced. The others I have gathered after many years of patient and pleasant research in the studios, the curiosity-shops, and the plaster-shops of most of the capitals of Europe and America. The story of this research, with an account of the means taken to identify the masks when they were discovered, could itself make a book of this size. I am sure that mine is the actual death-mask of Aaron Burr, for instance, because I have the personal guarantee of the man who made the mould in 1836; I am positive of the identity of another cast, because I saw it made myself; and concerning still another, I have no question, because I know the man who stole it! In the matter of the great majority of the masks, however, the difficulties were very great. Hardly one _per centum_ of the hundreds of biographers whose works I have consulted ever refer to the taking of a mask in life, or after death, and there is absolutely no literature which is devoted to the subject. The cast of Sheridan’s hand is often alluded to, the mask of his dead face is nowhere mentioned; and yet there appears to be no doubt that both were taken. The cast of his head has been compared carefully with all the existing portraits; it has been examined by experts in portraiture; phrenologists have described the character of the man most accurately, from its bumps and its physiognomy; it was certainly made