that men with anchylosis of the neck possess remarkably bright intelligence. It is a common saying that the hump-backed are keen and malicious. Rokitansky sought to explain this by the resulting curve of the aorta, after giving origin to the vessels which supply the brain, the volume of the heart and the arterial pressure in the head being thus augmented. CHAPTER V. THE INFLUENCE OF CIVILIZATION AND OF OPPORTUNITY. Large Towns--Large Schools--Accidents--Misery--Power--Education. However clearly such laws as we have examined may seem to be ascertained, the conclusions deduced from them must be accepted with a certain reserve; since there exists a series of factors, almost impossible to seize, which intercept and confound all these influences, not excepting even the orographic. We have already seen how great agglomerations of individuals, whatever the climate and race, are sufficient to increase the number of artists and of talents. But might not this be a purely factitious effect, as, for instance, when individuals who have left their birthplace for some great capital (as often happens in the case of infants and invalids), are looked upon as natives of the latter? This becomes certain, if we remember the pernicious influence of great towns, and consider with Smiles, that the life of large towns is not favourable to intellectual work, that men who have had a great influence on their age have been brought up in solitude, and that all the great men of England, and even of London, were born in the country, though this fact is often ignored on account of their having fixed their residence in the capital. Carlyle says that a man born in London seems but the fraction of a man. We read, in the _Lives of the Engineers_, that all great English engineers have been country-bred. The establishment of a school of painting, even when it is the result of an importation, makes an artistic centre of a place which was not so previously, and, if the establishment goes back to a very distant time, the number of artists becomes very large. Let us look, for example, at Piedmont, where, assuredly, a military education reinforced by climate and race, and, to a still greater degree, by clerical influence, retarded for a long time the development of the fine arts, and especially of music. Up to 1460, celebrated painters were not numerous in Piedmont, and the only ones to be found there were of foreign origin, such as Bono and Bondiforte. But Bondiforte, who had been sent for from Milan, was immediately followed by Sodoma, Martini, Giovannone, Vercellese. Ferro di Valduggia was followed by Lanini, and Tansi by Valduggia, in the same way as Viotti’s example attracted thither, within a short time, five celebrated violinists.