THE ORIGIN OF GENIUS.

Taihape Daily Times, 30 January 1919, Page 5

THE ORIGIN OF GENIUS.

In tho Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons is a weird chamber containing battalions of ernct skeletons. And there, in the midst of this gruesome assembly, towers the Titan frame of Byrne, the Irish giant. He stood Bft 4in in his socks, and stands Bft 2in in his bones. As I gazed the other day on his bleached skull mountainously prominent above all the rest, it struck me grimly what a conspicuous target for the enemy’s bullets such a man would be in battle (says a writer in the “Sunday Chronicle’’). Greatness does not consist in mere bigness. And when ieugenists talk of breeding a race of supermen and eliminating the unfit, how do they classify their ideal and mark off the unfit The great generals and admirals were nearly all small men. The world’s geniuses in nearly every sphere of effort have been unbalanced, neurotic, and weak in body. Byron, Shelly, Keats, and Herbert Spencer, among men of mind, were nearly all defective or diseased. Among men of action similar unfitness existed in Nelson, Napoleon, and Julius Caesar, Shakespeare was the son of a butcher, and so was Cardinal Wolsey. Turner, the world's greatest landscape painter, was a barberfs hoy, like Arkwright, the founder of the cotton industry. Ben Jonson was a "bricklayer. Burns was a ploughman, and Keats was son of a livery stable keeper. Inigo Jones, the architect, was a carpenter, Carlyle was the son of a mason, and Banyan was a tinker. You never know Tvhere your great men are coming from.