If the creator of Duncan was right in saying that there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face, then must the author of the _Novum Organum_ have been wrong when he declared that “physiognomy ... discovereth the disposition of the mind by the lineaments of the body;” and these, curiously enough, are parallel passages never quoted by the believers in the theory that Bacon was the writer of Shakspere’s plays. It is not intended here to enter into a discussion of the merits or demerits of physiognomy. This is an Exhibition of Portraits, not a Phrenological Lecture. I shall try to show how these men and women looked, in life and in death, not why they happened to look as they did; and I shall dwell generally upon their brains, occasionally upon their bones, but only incidentally upon their bumps. The ancient Romans are said to have made, in wax, casts of the faces of their illustrious dead. These masks are believed to have been colored to represent the originals as they appeared in life, to have been cherished religiously by their descendants through many generations, and, on the occasion of a public and formal funeral, it is thought that they were sometimes worn by professional mourners, as a sort of posthumous tribute from the dead already to the memory of the latest man who had died. And recent explorers have satisfied themselves that in the early burials of many nations it was the custom to cover the heads and bodies of the dead with sheets of gold so pliable that they took the impress of the form; and not infrequently, when in the course of centuries the embalmed flesh had shrivelled or fallen away, the gold retained the exact cast of the features. Schliemann found a number of bodies “covered with large masks of gold-plate in _repoussé_-work,” several of which have been reproduced by means of engraving, in his _Mycenæ_; and he asserted that there can be no doubt whatever that each one of these represents the likeness of the deceased person whose face it covered.